§ 1

What this site is

Filthy Little Atheist is a complete digital edition of The Works of Thomas Paine plus a year-by-year timeline, the people in his circle, a curated bibliography, lesson plans, and a researcher's portal.

Three things to know before diving in:

• Nothing leaves your browser. Notes, highlights, bookmarks, your reading log — all stored in your own localStorage. There is no server-side database; there is no account to make.
• Every work is public domain. Read it, copy it, quote it, repost it. See /license/ for the (very permissive) details.
• The reader is the runtime. Search, citation generation, exports, even the daily-drip rotator all run client-side. Cloudflare Pages just serves static HTML; everything else happens in your browser.

§ 2

The reader toolbar

A small dark toolbar pins to the bottom of every work page. From left to right.

• Reader panel (lines icon) — opens the side panel with table of contents, your highlights for this work, your notes, and your bookmarks.
• Highlight (when text is selected) — wraps your selection in a yellow highlight, persisted in localStorage.
• Add note (when text is selected) — opens a note editor scoped to your selection.
• Bookmark this spot — saves the current scroll position so the reader can return to it.
• Save to reading list — adds the work to your saved readings.
• Share & export — opens the share modal: ten social targets, citation generator, five export formats.
• Reading-progress readout + back-to-top button move into the toolbar on work pages so all reader controls cluster in one place.

§ 3

Reader settings panel

Open the gear icon in the reader panel (or the masthead on non-work pages) for a settings drawer. Everything here persists locally.

• Theme. Light / dark / sepia / system. The site honours prefers-color-scheme by default and the manual toggle overrides per session.
• Typeface. Default (EB Garamond), Lora, Merriweather, Roboto, Open Sans, Libre Baskerville, Crimson Pro, IBM Plex Serif, Literata, Atkinson Hyperlegible (a typeface designed for low-vision readers), Playfair Display.
• Line spacing. Tight / normal / relaxed. The relaxed setting passes the WCAG 1.4.12 line-spacing guideline by default.
• Word spacing. Normal / wide / wider — useful for dyslexia-supportive reading.
• Background tint. The default is the cream paper color; alternatives include sepia and high-contrast.
• Article tools. Show paragraph numbers (handy for citing), show a reading ruler that follows the cursor, autoscroll at adjustable speed (for hands-free dictation or screen-reader pacing).
• Reset. Clears every reader setting back to default in one click.

§ 4

Paragraph + page anchors

Every paragraph has an ID (#p3, #p4, etc.) emitted in the source HTML. Right-click any paragraph (or the heading above it) to copy a link straight to that paragraph. The citation generator can also build a citation anchored to the current paragraph or — when the work has Dresden page-number markers — to the printed page.

Stable identifier scheme: every work also carries a conway:vol-N:slug identifier (e.g. conway:vol-3:about-the-holy-bible) emitted in JSON-LD, the OAI-PMH record, and the BibTeX export. URLs survive renames; identifiers survive both renames and host changes.

§ 5

Glossary tooltips

Period terms that a modern reader might not recognize (Talmage, Bismarck, abolitionist, lyceum, free-soil, etc.) are wrapped in dotted-underline .gloss spans. Hover or tap the term for a one-paragraph definition; click through for the full glossary entry. On mobile the tooltips fire on tap and dismiss on tap-elsewhere.

Optional: in the reader-settings panel, toggle "Glossary on every occurrence" — by default the tooltip wires to the first appearance of each term per work; the setting expands it to every appearance.

§ 6

Audio (when available)

Some works ship with a click-to-load LibriVox dramatic reading at the top of the article. Audio is not auto-loaded; it only fetches if you press play. Speed is adjustable (0.75× / 1× / 1.25× / 1.5×). Where transcript-synced audio is available, paragraph IDs double as chapter markers — clicking ahead in the transcript scrubs the audio and vice versa.

§ 7

The highlight flow

1. Select any text in a work (click + drag, or double-click for a single word, or triple-click for a paragraph).
2. The reader toolbar's highlight button activates. Click it.
3. The selection wraps in a yellow <mark> persisted to localStorage under the key annotations.<slug>.
4. Subsequent visits to the same work reload your highlights automatically.

Highlights are always yellow (the color-picker was retired because it was unreliable on mobile). To remove a highlight, click it once and choose Delete from the inline menu.

§ 8

Adding a note

The flow is the same as highlighting, but use the add note button instead. A modal opens with the selected passage as a quotation header; type your note in the textarea below and save. The selection is highlighted with a slightly different visual treatment (yellow + tiny note marker) and the full note appears in the reader-panel Notes tab and on /notes/.

§ 9

Bookmarks

The bookmark button in the reader toolbar saves the current scroll position. The bookmark stores a percentage offset and the nearest paragraph ID, so even if the page reflows after a font-size change the marker still lands close to where you left off. View your bookmarks in the reader panel's Bookmarks tab; click any bookmark to scroll there.

§ 10

Browsing your notes

Visit /notes/ for a single page that lists every highlight + note across every work, sorted by recency. Filter by work, search by note text, or open the source paragraph in one click. The page reads from localStorage only — closing this tab and opening another browser shows a different, empty list, because the notes never left your device.

§ 11

Exporting your notes

From the reader panel's Notes tab on any work page, three buttons download your annotations.

• TXT — plain-text dump of every quote + note + heading reference for the current work.
• JSON — full structured payload (timestamps, paragraph IDs, note text, highlight color, work slug).
• Markdown — formatted dump suitable for pasting into Obsidian, Notion, or any Markdown reader.

The print button opens a printable view styled like a study handout: each highlight on its own line with the note beneath, headed by the work's full citation.

§ 12

Saved readings + reading calendar

Click the bookmark-with-arrow icon in the reader toolbar to save a work to your reading list. The list lives at /saved-readings/ and is stored locally. Each entry shows the work title, volume, year, estimated reading time, and a one-click "open" link.

The site also keeps a private reading log — a record of which works you opened on which days. Powering the log:

• /reading-calendar/ — a GitHub-contribution-style heatmap showing how many works you opened each day for the last year.
• Continue reading rail on the homepage — the most recent work you opened, with a "pick up where you left off" button.

The log records slugs and timestamps only — never your scroll position, never the text of any note. Clear it from the reader-settings panel's reset button at any time.

§ 13

The search popup

Press / from anywhere on the site (except inside an open text field) to open the search popup. It slides in from the top with the cursor focused on the input. Type a few characters and the dropdown shows the top matches across all works, posts, and reference pages, each highlighting the matched fragment in context.

• ↑ / ↓ to move through results.
• Enter to open the highlighted result.
• Esc to close.

§ 14

The search page + facets

For longer queries, visit /search/. Same index, same input, plus left-rail facets:

• Type — Work / Post / Reference page.
• Volume — limit to one of the twelve Conway volumes.
• Category — Lecture, Essay, Debate, Speech, Tribute, Legal Argument, Interview.
• Decade — narrow by 1860s / 1870s / 1880s / 1890s.

Voice input is supported on browsers that ship the Web Speech API (Chrome, Edge, Safari) — click the microphone icon and dictate. The audio never leaves your browser; the recognition runs locally.

§ 15

By volume

The masthead nav bar has a column per volume (I–XII). Hover any volume for a mega-menu listing every work in that volume; click the volume name for a per-volume index page with the full table of contents and editorial framing.

§ 16

A–Z, concepts, topics

• /works/a-z/ — encyclopedia-style alphabetical, every work indexed by first significant word.
• /works/concepts/ — back-of-book concept index of 60+ recurring ideas, each linked to the works that develop it.
• /topics/ — eleven thematic buckets (Religion, Liberty, Politics, Family, Science, etc.) with per-topic pages.

§ 17

By year, decade, archive

• /works/by-year/ — vertical bar chart of the year-by-year output, click a bar to surface that year's works.
• /works/by-decade/ — coarser bucket grouping (1860s–1890s).
• /archives/ — the canonical year-by-year archive, including timeline cross-references.

§ 18

Longest, shortest, random

• /works/longest/ — sorted by word count, longest first. Useful when you want a long-form lecture.
• /works/shortest/ — quick entry points; the shortest pieces in the canon.
• /works/random/ — a server-side redirect that lands you on a random work each time you load it. Bookmark this for daily reading.

§ 19

Topic map + concept graph

• /works/topic-map/ — D3 force-directed graph of the 177 works tied to their topics. Drag nodes around; hover for the work title.
• /concept-graph/ — chord diagram showing how the eleven concept categories share works.

§ 20

Start here, spotlight, plans

Three editorial entry-points if you don't know where to begin.

• /start-here/ — five works in order, the editor's "if you read nothing else, read these."
• /works/featured/ — six landmark works with a short editorial introduction each.
• /reading-plans/ — themed itineraries (Religion, Liberty, Politics, etc.) with progress tracking.

§ 21

Timeline + lecture map

/timeline/ is a year-by-year chronology of Paine's life from 1833 to 1899. Each entry carries a date, a title, a one-paragraph description, and (where applicable) a Place with latitude and longitude. The page renders a Leaflet map alongside the chronology — every dated event with coordinates plots on the map, click a pin to scroll the chronology entry into view, click a chronology entry to highlight the pin. Filter by category (Life, Lectures, Politics, Debates) using the chip strip above the map.

For the lecture-circuit specifically, see /lecture-tour/ — an extended map with hundreds of lecture stops from 1860 onward, linked to transcripts where extant.

§ 22

This day in his life

/this-day/ is a calendar of every dated event indexed by month and day, so you can see what Paine was doing on (say) August 11 — his birthday, but also the date he gave the Decoration Day oration in 1888. The home page surfaces the current day's anchor automatically; the page also exposes a JSON Feed at /api/this-day.json if you'd like to wire it into your own reader.

§ 23

Connections + influences

• /connections/ — twelve close contemporaries (Lincoln, Twain, Whitman, Edison, Carnegie, Susan B. Anthony, etc.) with the relationship explained, the works that bear on it, and a representative quote.
• /influences/ — Paine, Voltaire, Hume, Bruno, the lineage Paine claimed for himself.

§ 24

Debates + legacy

• /debates/ — the published exchanges (Gladstone, Manning, Field, Black, Talmage), each linked to the source work.
• /legacy/ — what survived of him after 1899: the Conway Edition, the freethought lyceum, the influence on Twain and Edison and the early 20th-century skeptics.

§ 25

The share & export modal

The share button in the reader toolbar opens a single full-screen modal (mobile) / centered-card modal (desktop) with everything you need to send the work elsewhere or pull it down for offline use. Three sections.

• Share this work. Ten brand targets — X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Reddit, Hacker News, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp, Telegram — plus email and copy-link.
• Cite or print. Opens the citation generator (below) or the printable view.
• Downloads. Five export formats (below).

Close with the X, by clicking outside, by pressing Esc, or by activating any download / share link (the modal auto-dismisses so the action's default behavior completes).

§ 26

The citation generator

From the share modal, choose Cite this work. A second native <dialog> opens with four tabs.

• APA 7th — Paine, R. G. (year). Title. In The Works of Thomas Paine (Vol. N). Conway Edition.
• MLA 9th — Paine, Thomas "Title." The Works of Thomas Paine, vol. N, Conway ed., year, URL.
• Chicago 17 — Paine, Thomas "Title." In The Works of Thomas Paine, vol. N, Conway ed. Year. URL.
• BibTeX — Ready-to-paste @incollection entry for LaTeX or Pandoc.

An anchor row above the tabs lets you cite the whole work, the paragraph closest to the top of your viewport (uses the live #p ID), or the printed Conway page (when page-number markers are present).

§ 27

Five export formats

• .txt — Plain text, footnotes inlined as bracketed asides. Universal source-of-truth fallback.
• .json — Structured payload: front-matter, paragraphs (with IDs), footnotes, citation metadata. Machine-readable.
• .bib — BibTeX, citable directly in LaTeX / Pandoc.
• .ris — Research Information Systems format for Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley.
• Print — Browser-rendered printable view with citation footer and footnotes at the end. No paragraph numbers; the printed page is a clean reading document.

Bulk: /api/works.json + /api/downloads.json describe every work in the corpus and every download URL — feed them to your tool of choice.

§ 28

Permanent links + Wayback

Every URL on this site is intended to be permanent. The slug → identifier map is frozen; works are never renamed; pages are corrected, not redirected. To make a citation extra-durable, append the URL to https://web.archive.org/save to trigger an immediate Wayback Machine snapshot. The site also auto-submits its own sitemap to the Wayback Machine via a GitHub Actions workflow — see /preservation/ for details.

§ 29

Feeds + daily drip

• /feed.xml — site-wide Atom feed (newest essays + announcements).
• /works/feed.xml — works-only Atom (newly-transcribed works).
• /this-day/feed.xml — Atom variant of the this-day feed.
• /api/this-day.json — JSON Feed 1.1 variant of the same.

For developers: every feed is statically generated and cached at the edge; polling from a feed reader puts essentially zero load on the origin.

§ 30

For researchers

/research/ is the canonical entry point. The features that make this site usable as a primary source.

• Stable identifiers. Every work has a conway:vol-N:slug identifier in JSON-LD, OAI-PMH, and BibTeX exports.
• Wikidata / VIAF / LCNAF authority links on the Person (Paine) entity.
• Per-work revision history at /works/<slug>/history/ — every commit that touched the work, with date and editor.
• OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint at /api/oai-pmh/identify.xml — Identify, ListIdentifiers, ListRecords, GetRecord, ListMetadataFormats. Dublin Core. Suitable for DPLA / Internet Archive harvesters.
• Six JSON datasets at /api/works.json, /api/downloads.json, /api/work-history.json, /api/concordance.json, /api/glossary.json, /api/this-day.json.
• Bibliography of modern scholarship at /bibliography/ with worksRelevant cross-references that surface as a "Further reading" aside on each cited work.
• Manuscript Watch at /manuscripts/ — eleven institutions with documented physical Dresden + Paine papers holdings.

For the full data portal — every machine-readable surface in one human-readable list with example URLs and rate-limit notes — see /data/.

§ 31

For the classroom

/classroom/ collects teacher-facing materials: lesson plans, discussion questions, suggested readings by grade level (high school / undergraduate / graduate), and fair-use guidance for handouts. The Conway text is public domain; you can reproduce any passage in any classroom format without permission.

Pair the classroom page with the start-here reading list and the reading plans for ready-to-use unit structure. Every work links its own glossary terms (period vocabulary) so students can read primary-source 1880s prose without surrounding context becoming a barrier.

§ 32

Keyboard + a11y

• Tab walks every interactive element with a visible focus ring.
• / opens the search popup from anywhere outside a text field.
• Esc closes any open layer — slide-in nav, share modal, citation dialog, search popup, gallery lightbox, mega-menu, reader panel.
• The first focusable item on every page is a Skip to main content link.
• Body text is 18 px (inside the 16–20 px range every accessibility guideline recommends for long-form reading).
• Touch targets are ≥ 44 × 44 px; the size is enforced by a token (--tap-target).
• All animations respect prefers-reduced-motion; nothing auto-plays.
• The reader-settings panel includes Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface designed for low-vision readers, plus increased line- and word-spacing presets.
• JSON-LD speakable hints point voice assistants at the actual prose, not the chrome.

For the full accessibility statement and reporting form, see /accessibility/.

§ 33

Your data

The full key list is documented at /privacy/. The highlights.

• annotations.<slug>, bookmarks.<slug> — your highlights / notes / bookmarks per work.
• fla-saved-readings, fla-reading-log, fla-reading-resume — saved works, the reading-log heatmap data, and the continue-reading anchor.
• theme, fla-gs-*, fla-rs-* — display + reader-tool preferences.

To clear everything: open the reader-settings panel and press Reset, or clear the site data from your browser's site-settings page. There is no undo because there is no copy on my end.

§ 34

How to contribute

• Transcription errors. Report via /contact/ or open a GitHub issue. Confirmed errors land in the public Git history and on the per-work /works/<slug>/history/ page.
• Editorial commentary. Pitch an essay via /submit/ — long-form pieces only, signed and dated, in the editorial voice of /ethics/.
• New transcriptions. If you've transcribed a Conway volume passage that isn't yet on the site (uncommon — every volume is ingested), say so and I'll work the source into the corpus.
• Code. The site is open-source MIT (github.com/jonajinga/filthy-little-atheist). Pull requests are welcome.

§ 35

Common issues

• Highlights / notes don't persist. Your browser is in private / incognito mode (which clears localStorage on close), or the site has been allowed but storage is full. Check the storage quota in your browser's site settings.
• The share modal won't close. The modal has five close paths (X button, click-outside, Esc, the underlying form, an inline onclick). If somehow none of them work in your browser, refresh the page — no state is lost.
• Search returns no results. Pagefind requires JavaScript to load the index. Check that JS isn't blocked for filthylittleatheist.com.
• The font looks different on first paint. Bunny Fonts is loading; the system serif fallback renders first. Subsequent navigation is instant once the font cache warms.
• Dark mode flashes light at the start of a page load. Shouldn't happen — there's an inline no-flash script. If it does, file a bug at /contact/ with your browser + OS so I can reproduce.
• A page is missing or the URL changed. Slugs are frozen; a missing URL is a bug, not a redesign. Report at /contact/ and the redirect goes in within the day.

Anything missing from this guide? Tell me.