The Curve
by s7ven
Record
Changelog
Everything that has changed since the first build, newest first. Entries record what changed for a reader rather than every commit. Open one to see the detail.
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A way in, an index, and the essay The Hedge needed
Three additions aimed at the same problem: eighty terms is a lot to walk into without a path through them.
- A Start here page: seven entries in a deliberate order, with the reason for each, and the order to take the sections in afterwards.
- Every section page now ends with an A–Z of every term it contains, linking straight to the entry.
- A long-form essay on the assumption underneath every gamma chart — what exchanges publish, what gets assumed, where the convention breaks, and why a wrong assumption flips the sign rather than shifting the magnitude.
- Search placeholder, home page description and legal copy updated to reflect five sections rather than three.
- Asset URLs now carry a content hash, so a cached stylesheet can no longer be served against newer markup.
- A new build check reports any HTML class with no matching CSS rule, after an edit silently removed three sections of styling.
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Options flow, and a page of questions
The fifth pillar arrives, covering what dealers are obliged to do after taking the other side, alongside a two-part FAQ.
- New section, The Hedge, with 26 terms across dealer exposure, volatility, positioning and flow reading.
- Gamma and delta exposure, vanna and charm, the gamma flip, and long and short gamma regimes.
- The Triad: realised, forward and implied volatility, plus the variance risk premium and the volatility surface.
- Call, put and gamma walls, open interest by strike, max pain and expiry pinning.
- An entry stating plainly that every dealer exposure figure rests on an assumption about ownership that exchanges never publish.
- Two new diagrams: a gamma exposure profile across strikes, and open interest by strike with both walls marked.
- A Questions page in two parts — nineteen about the site, twenty about the subject itself.
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The data integrity essay finally goes live
An essay written days earlier turned out never to have been published. The link checker caught it.
- Why your numbers differ from mine: seven sources of divergence between two platforms reading the same session.
- Trade classification, book granularity, tick filtering, session boundaries, roll adjustment, timestamps and fragmentation.
- It had been sitting unregistered in the content folder the whole time. The build's own link validation surfaced it.
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Contact details, real domain, and a logo pack
Placeholders removed throughout, and the mark exported properly for use away from the site.
- support@thecurve.in now appears in the Terms, Legal and Disclaimer pages.
- Every reference to the working domain replaced with thecurve.in, including all Open Graph tags and the sitemap.
- Logo pack: circular emblem, square mark, bare curve, and horizontal and stacked lockups, each in light and dark.
- App icons and social avatars exported as PNG, plus a usage guide covering clear space, minimum sizes and what not to do.
- Lockup wordmarks converted to outline paths, so they render identically anywhere without a font file.
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Daily social generation
A script that produces a dated folder of posts from the site's own content, on a schedule.
- Three post designs — definition, misconception and quote — each at square and portrait.
- A ten-second animation rendered to MP4: order book, delta, volume profile, forward curve, then the mark.
- Captions written per post, with the day's manifest recording exactly what was used.
- Definitions are pulled from the same file the site is built from, so a post can never contradict the reference.
- Rotation cycles without repeats: every term appears before any term appears twice.
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Motion, and a terms gate
The site learns to move, and asks readers to agree to something before it hands over the material.
- A first-visit intro: the emblem fills the screen, holds, then flies to its exact place above the title as the page fades in behind it.
- It runs once ever, honours reduced-motion, and has a safety timeout so a stalled animation can never hide the site.
- Page arrival now staggers — page mark, header, body, footer — rather than appearing as one block.
- Consent dialog two seconds after the intro. Declining explains why it exists rather than closing.
- The terms page carries its own agree bar, so the terms are readable while deciding.
- Everything is built in script and the content stays in the DOM, so search engines index normally and a browser without JavaScript sees the site untouched.
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A timeline, an essay on the industry, and search
Three additions that changed what the site is for as much as what it contains.
- An interactive timeline, 1730 to now, with fourteen events. Hover or focus a node to read it; a plain dated list appears without JavaScript.
- The Pitch: why a working method is a strange thing to sell, what actually makes one profitable, and eight ways a backtest lies.
- Search built into the drawer, ranking exact matches, then title and alias prefixes, then definition text.
- Eight hand-drawn diagrams, one per topic, including why imbalance is measured diagonally and how a print becomes a buy or a sell.
- Open Graph share images generated at build time for every page, using the site's own fonts and motif.
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Left menu, named sections, and legal pages
The largest restructure so far. Navigation moved, sections were renamed, and the site gained a proper legal footing.
- Navigation moved from a top bar to a left drawer with expandable groups. The chevron opens the topic list; the label goes to the section's own page.
- Sections named: The Tape for order flow, The Contract for futures, The Right for options, The Feed for data and measurement.
- Each section gained a base page explaining the field before naming a single term, with a minimal index of its topics.
- Terms & Conditions and a Legal page, both stating that nothing guarantees any outcome, that no liability is accepted, and that none of the terminology is claimed as original work.
- Legal pages live in the footer, deliberately out of the menu.
- A build script replaced hand-edited pages: one layout function, one content model, every page generated.
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The reference takes shape
The glossary tripled, gained context lines, and the site got a mark of its own.
- 54 terms across six groups, each with a definition and then the thing people usually get wrong about it.
- A new data and measurement section on trade classification, book granularity, tick filtering and session boundaries.
- A logo: a rounded square holding a rising curve through two faint contract-month rules, with a matching favicon.
- Footer rebuilt with the notice centred and the links beneath it.
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First build
The design system, the first pages, and the rules the site has been held to since.
- Apple-style frosted glass on a solid ink field, with a footprint grid motif behind it — the texture the glass refracts.
- No CSS gradients anywhere, enforced by a check that fails the build. Depth comes from blur, alpha layering and hairlines.
- Bid green and ask red reserved for data, never for buttons, links or navigation.
- Self-hosted variable fonts: Inter Tight for display, Source Serif 4 for reading, JetBrains Mono for figures.
- Home page, two full concept entries, a glossary, the standing essay on why no strategies are published, and a disclaimer.
- Guardrails from day one: no gradients, no strategy language, a disclaimer on every page, and every internal link resolving.
Nothing under that filter.