Author here. Firstly, this is all free, not selling a book or anything. Honestly, these are not good enough for that. But if you get to the end you'll see where all of it eventually led. So, in 2004 I had a folder with poems I typed mostly late at night, in my early 20's. Navigation buttons and GIFs for a website I was building to share them, and a mailing list of 86 addresses. I wonder how many are still active. The entire plan was in a todo.txt two lines long: "add a word of the week / photo gallery."

I found the folder this year, 20+ years later. This site is what that folder wanted to be.

The poems are as-written with typos, odd grammar, Microsoft Word's 2004 auto-capitalization, and all.

The first chapter reads free; after that, each chapter break asks you simply to leave a message for everyone to see, something true of your own (anonymous, human-moderated). The collection is called Unprotected Text and it felt right that reading unprotected words should eventually cost a few of your own.

Eleven poems didn't make the cut. But readers who finish can have them by email.

Tech: one ~70KB HTML file plus a few small serverless functions on Cloudflare's free tier. No framework, no accounts, no third-party trackers.

Website: https://unprotectedtext.org/

I'll be here in the comments or there if you decide to leave something behind, hopefully also unprotected text, or anything really.