Keep These

Keep These is a web app for making blackout poetry from a small, carefully curated shelf of classic writing.

Meet one page, keep the words that speak, and let the rest fall away. Keep These never chooses words or composes a poem for you. Work is saved in your browser, PNG exports are made on your device, and every passage retains its source and a route back to the original work.

Keep These was prompted by Andrew Lavers' Psyche film about blackout poetry, which credits the work of Austin Kleon. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Psyche, Andrew Lavers, or Austin Kleon.

Try it

The current app is available at keepthese.com. It is a static site with no accounts, advertising trackers, poem uploads, backend, or runtime cloud dependency. It counts visits in aggregate with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sees no poem content.

Product principles

• discovery, not generation;
• attention, not engagement;
• material feeling without sacrificing accessibility;
• private making as a complete experience;
• visible attribution and a continuing relationship with the source text;
• staged development, with later capabilities gated by evidence and explicit decisions.

The fuller app and authorship boundaries are recorded in PRODUCT.md and CREATIVE_CHARTER.md.

Technology

Keep These uses Astro for its static, content-led site and React for one interactive studio island. Creative state and PNG generation remain on the device. The literary passages and their rights, provenance, attribution, and editorial records are validated at build time.

Local development

Use the Node.js release pinned in .node-version and npm:

npm ci
npm run dev

The development server prints its local URL. Create and inspect the static production build with:

npm run build
npm run preview

No environment variables or service credentials are required to build, test, or run the application locally. Keep local credentials in ignored .env or *.local files and never commit them. If configuration is introduced later, commit only a value-free .env.example describing the required names.

Verification

Run the complete local quality suite with:

npm run check

This runs formatting verification, ESLint, Markdown linting, unit and component tests, strict Astro and TypeScript checking, the production build, and static search-output verification. GitHub Actions runs the same contract for every pull request and push to main.

The separate Playwright suite exercises the creative journey at desktop and a representative narrow viewport:

npx playwright install chromium
npm run test:browser

Browser failures retain screenshots and traces in ignored local directories.

Contributing

The source is available publicly primarily for transparency, learning, and permitted reuse. Bug reports, accessibility findings, and focused corrections are welcome, but public availability does not create an obligation to accept a proposal or provide support. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening an issue or pull request.

Report vulnerabilities privately as described in SECURITY.md, never through a public issue.

Licensing

This is a mixed-rights repository; the entire tree is not covered by one blanket licence:

• original application code is available under the MIT License;
• identified original documentation and editorial metadata are available under CC BY 4.0;
• the Keep These name, brand, distinctive visual identity, and original visual assets remain all rights reserved;
• literary passages and third-party material retain their individual public-domain evidence, provenance, licences, and terms;
• makers retain whatever rights they hold in the poems and artwork they create.

Read LICENSING.md for the path-by-path material map and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for dependencies, literary sources, and generated-material provenance.

Project records

• Product direction
• Creative charter
• Architecture
• Source material and rights
• Public repository audit
• Open-source release runbook
• Project workflow
• Release and recovery procedure
• AI collaboration guide