About Rooibos World

Who publishes it

Rooibos World is published by Cloudskraal Farms, a rooibos grower on the Bokkeveld plateau near Nieuwoudtville and the farm behind the trade page on this site. The person behind both is Alex Nel. No company registration details are published here; the trade page gives the public contact that applies to enquiries.

The library and the trade page are deliberately separate. The library draws on public sources and is written to be useful whoever you buy from. The trade page is the one place that sells something, and it says so. Where the library links to the trade page, that is the owner pointing to the owner's own offer, and it is labelled as such.

One library, several doors

Rooibos World is intended as the single home for this publisher's rooibos writing. Related names the publisher holds are meant, in time, to lead into sections of this library rather than to carry duplicate sites; none of those arrangements is active yet, and the standalone trade page still carries the same offer as the trade page here. A companion publication, Nieuwoudtville, a destination atlas, covers the plateau as a place to visit.

Photographs, drawings and maps

The photographs are Alex Nel's own, taken on and around the farm, except for a small set of plant close-ups from Wikimedia Commons that carry their photographer and licence in the caption. Captions describe what is visible and do not identify a crop, a field or a species beyond what the photographer has confirmed. The explorers are drawn for this library. The maps are built from Natural Earth public-domain data, generalised, with editorial points placed by town or landmark; they draw no field, farm or legal boundary. Fonts are Bodoni Moda, Alegreya and Alegreya Sans under the SIL Open Font License, served from this site.

What happens to what you type

The brief builder assembles your brief in your browser. Brief inputs stay in your browser: the page makes no request to any server with them, stores nothing between visits, and sets no cookies. The brief leaves your machine only when you download it, copy it, or click one of the handoff links, which open your own email app or WhatsApp with the brief as a draft for you to send or discard. The library search on the home page filters the list on the page and sends nothing. The maps and explorers load no remote tiles or scripts.

No tracking integration is enabled by default: no analytics script, no third-party fonts, no pixels. The hosting provider that serves these static files keeps its own request logs under its own policy, which is outside this site's code.

The optional event hook

For whoever later runs this site and wants to count how often the tools are used, the brief builder dispatches a browser event named rooibosworld:brief on the document when a brief is generated, downloaded, copied, handed off or reset, and the explorers and atlas dispatch similar events named rooibosworld:stage and rooibosworld:place when a stage or place is selected. Each carries only an action or selection name and, for the brief, a timestamp, never form contents. No listener is attached by default, so by default the events go nowhere. Attaching one would be a deliberate change, and this page must then be updated to say what is counted and where it goes.

Language

The library is written in English. Five pages are written in Japanese, under /ja/: a gateway, brewing, reading the research, espresso-style use and sourcing. They are original pages for readers in Japan, not a translation of the library, and every link from them to an English page says so. Both languages have stable addresses and a visible English/日本語 switch on every page; the links work without scripts. Afrikaans pages will follow once they can be reviewed properly, not before.

If you arrive on an English page from Japan, the page may show a short invitation to read the Japanese pages. To know whether to show it, the page makes one request to this site's own address /api/locale, which answers with the two-letter country code that the hosting provider attaches to the request in its x-vercel-ip-country header, and nothing else. No outside lookup service is used, no browser location prompt is made, and the answer is marked private and not to be cached. The site never redirects you and never replaces a page because of the country. If you choose a language with the switch or the invitation, that choice, only the language you chose, is remembered in your own browser so the invitation does not return; the country is not stored. If storage is blocked or the request fails, nothing changes and the language links still work.