Inside This Issue

Why We're Doing This The Old Way

There is a particular pleasure in a publication that ends. A feed never closes; a magazine does. This edition was written, laid out, and finished — then set down, the way a printed issue used to land in your hands on a Tuesday and stay finished until the next one arrived.

Everything you're reading lives in plain HTML. No build step, no server rendering, no subscription. If you like it, install it from the button up top and it's yours — readable on a train, in a waiting room, anywhere the signal drops.

"One edition, one publication. Not a stream — a snapshot."

Turn the page when you're ready.

What's Actually Simmering

In plain words: what this is, and how it was made.

This is a digital magazine. It has pages you flip through, like a real magazine, but you read it in a web browser on a phone or a computer.

One person made it — me, Edmund. I made it for an online contest called the DEV Frontend Challenge. In this contest, everyone is given the same subject and the same deadline. Each person then makes their own website about that subject, in whatever way they choose. No two people make the same thing.

"One subject. One deadline. Many different results."

For this contest, the subject was "comfort food." I chose to make a magazine about a food called Bolle and Fish, from Port Harcourt, a city in Nigeria. You can read about that food later in this issue.

This magazine is a small computer program. It is built only with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — the three basic building blocks used to make any web page. It does not use a framework, which is a set of ready-made tools that many websites are built on top of. This one has none of that.

While building it, I used an AI tool to help write and check the code. The AI did not decide what this magazine looks like or what it says. I made those decisions. The AI helped me work faster and catch mistakes.

That is what this magazine is, and how it was made. The next pages are about the food.

From Edmundsparrow's Kitchen

Comfort Food went out into the DEV Frontend Challenge, and if @sylwia-lask, @francistrdev, @dannwaneri or @technogamerz have a plate to spare — come see what a community member put on the table this time.

— Edmund

COMFORT
FOOD
ISSUE 01

A Portharcourt Original

Roasted plantain, grilled fish, and a pepper sauce that argues back. If you don't know bolle, you don't know Port Harcourt.

Every evening in Port Harcourt, smoke rises off roadside grills as ripe plantain chars slowly over coal beside the day's fish. There's no menu and no seating — just a bench, a plate or nylon bag, and a pepper sauce recipe nobody writes down. Locals call it bolle, and outside Rivers State it barely gets talked about, which is the city's loss.

Recipe