Welcome to Haleiki — Haleiki News

Today we're launching Haleiki — a new kind of knowledge base that treats structured knowledge with the care it deserves.

The name comes from Hawaiian: hale means "house" and ike means "knowledge." Haleiki is a house of knowledge — a read-only wiki framework designed to present curated information as a static site, with graph-derived navigation, dual themes, and a typography system built for sustained reading.

What Haleiki Is

Haleiki is not a CMS, not a note-taking tool, not a blogging engine. It is a framework for building read-only knowledge bases from structured content. Think of it as what happens when you take Wikipedia's information architecture — articles, categories, cross-references, taxonomy sidebars — and rebuild it as a modern static site with first-class design.

Every article in Haleiki is a source page: a focused treatment of a single topic, with prose, metadata, taxonomy cards, and links to related concepts. Above the source pages sit concept cards — higher-level nodes that gather related sources into navigable clusters. The relationship graph between concepts and sources drives the site's navigation: breadcrumbs, "See Also" grids, and category indices are all derived from the graph, not maintained by hand.

The entire site is statically generated. There is no database, no server-side rendering, no JavaScript framework. Content goes in as Markdown; HTML comes out. The result is fast, portable, and permanent.

The Demo

To show what Haleiki can do, we've built a demo knowledge base with 90 source articles spanning ten domains — from Dzogchen to quantum mechanics, from Bach to mycorrhiza. These articles are adapted from Wikipedia and Rigpa Wiki under Creative Commons licenses.

The demo is not a toy. Each article has real prose, real taxonomy metadata, and real cross-references. The goal was to demonstrate that Haleiki's design system holds up across diverse content: a mycology article and a music theory article should both feel at home, while their differences in structure and vocabulary remain visible.

Try the themes

Use the day/night toggle in the top navigation bar to switch between the warm ochre day theme and the deep oxide night theme. Both themes use the same token architecture — the same spacing, the same type scale, the same component structures — but express completely different moods.

The Design System

Haleiki's visual identity is built on three typefaces, each with a clear role: Red Hat Display for headlines, navigation, and UI elements; Newsreader for body prose and editorial content; and IBM Plex Mono for code, metadata, and system text. Every font size follows a perfect fourth scale (ratio 1.333), fluid from 360px to 1440px viewports.

The colour system uses OKLCH throughout — a perceptually uniform colour space where equal lightness steps produce equal perceived brightness across all hues. No more fighting with hex values that look right in a picker but wrong on screen. Semantic tokens like --accent-primary and --text-secondary map to OKLCH primitives, and swapping the data-theme attribute on the root element switches the entire palette.

TOML — Site configuration

[site]
title = "Haleiki Demo"
description = "A read-only wiki for structured knowledge"
base_url = "https://haleiki.oxur.org"

[theme]
default = "day"       # or "night"
allow_toggle = true

[content]
source_dir = "content/sources"
concept_dir = "content/concepts"

Toggle between day and night themes to see the same token architecture express two completely different moods. The day theme uses warm ochre and terracotta; the night theme shifts to deep oxide and amber. The typography, spacing, and components remain identical — only the colour primitives change.

What's Next

Haleiki is at the beginning of its journey. The immediate roadmap includes:

Concept cards — the higher-level navigation layer that groups related source pages
Search with Pagefind — client-side full-text search with faceted filtering by category and domain
CI/CD pipeline — automated builds, content validation, and deployment from a single git push
More content — expanding the demo beyond 90 articles and ten domains
Graph visualization — an interactive map of the knowledge graph for exploring connections

This is the beginning. We're building Haleiki because we believe structured knowledge deserves better than a CMS dump or a markdown file tree. It deserves careful typography, considered navigation, and a design system that holds up whether you're reading about fungal networks or functional programming.

If you're curious, explore the demo. Toggle the theme. Click through the categories. Read an article or two. And if you'd like to follow along as Haleiki develops, this news feed is where we'll share updates.