About Rooibos World

Who publishes it

Rooibos World is published by Alex Nel, who farms rooibos at Cloudskraal Farms on the Bokkeveld plateau near Nieuwoudtville. The farm's own offer is on the trade page, which gives the public contact for 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. The related publications include Rooibostees, an Afrikaans core library and Drink Rooibos, the Chinese library. The Japanese and Chinese editions cover the full core library with localized tools. The Afrikaans edition remains a core reading library with labelled English onward reading. The farm trade page carries this library’s own commercial offer. 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 core library has 21 topics in English, Japanese and Simplified Chinese. The Japanese library also retains a specialist espresso-style brewing note. Japanese and Chinese readers can explore the supply chain, places, market evidence and sourcing brief in their language, with source limitations kept visible. Language links lead to matching topics where a counterpart exists and work without scripts. These are edited language editions, not a claim of independent native-language certification. The Afrikaans core library is at Rooibostees; English interactive tools and longer research are labelled as onward reading. The Chinese guide is at Drink Rooibos.

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.