How this site is made

What this is

Southern Legends is an independent editorial project based in Jacksonville, Alabama. It profiles small business owners, makers, and people doing quiet, durable work in Northeast Alabama — not because they are famous, but because they are here, and because that is worth something. The site started as a way to learn to pay attention again after losing a lot. That is still mostly what it is.

There is also a journal. The profiles are about other people. The journal is about what is behind them — and behind me. The farm I lost, the diagnosis, the years in music and ministry before any of this. It lives here because these two things are not separate. The profiles make more sense once you know why someone would drive forty minutes to sit with a welder and ask him careful questions.

Type

Body text is set in Source Sans 3, a workhorse designed by Paul Hunt and released through Adobe. It reads cleanly at length without calling attention to itself.

Headlines and display text use Fraunces, a variable optical-size serif designed by Undercase Type. It has some warmth and age to it — appropriate for a site that spends time with people who have been at something for a long time.

Pull quotes and accent elements use Rock Salt, a handwritten typeface by Font Diner. It marks a shift in register — a breath between the reported prose and whatever line a subject said that stopped the interview cold.

The journal section draws on three additional handwritten faces — Caveat, Zeyada, and Permanent Marker — used sparingly for the kind of emphasis that belongs in personal writing but would feel out of place in a reported profile. Different content calls for different register. The type tries to follow.

Built with

The site is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel. Profiles and journal posts are written in MDX and live in a content directory. There is no CMS. There is no editorial team. There is one person writing, one laptop, and occasionally a decent cup of coffee.

Readers can leave comments on profiles and journal posts. There is a newsletter — infrequent, plain text, no tracking pixels. You can subscribe at /subscribe. If you have been reading for a while and want to help keep it going, there is a support page at /support.

Editorial standards

Every profile on this site was reported in person — a real conversation, usually at the subject's business or home, often lasting longer than either of us planned. Notes are taken by hand. Photos are taken on-site.

AI tools are used for research, outlining, and editing assistance. No profile is published with AI-generated prose. Any draft that starts from a machine goes through full rewriting before it goes anywhere near a publish button — not light editing, rewriting. If a piece doesn't sound like it came from a person who was in the room, it doesn't go up.

The lens here is mine. I choose who to profile, what questions to ask, which details make it to the page. That means the site reflects what I notice — which is shaped by my own history, my failures, the specific geography of my attention. I try to be honest about that rather than pretend the work is neutral, because it isn't. No journalism is.

Why these stories

There are a lot of people in this part of Alabama who have been building something for years — a business, a trade, a way of being in the world — and who have never had anyone sit down and ask them about it carefully. These stories exist because careful attention is the least expensive thing I can offer, and because I think it matters that someone wrote it down.