What it is
Mallow Network is a small, privately run network rooted in Maryland. It started the way most home setups do, with one useful service and then another, and grew into something worth giving a name, a look and a proper front door.
It has two halves. The private side holds the everyday tools: bookmarks, dashboards and the services a household actually uses. The public side is this website, which explains what the network is and shares what we've learned building it.
The house itself runs on Home Assistant: porch lights that follow the sun, a laundry notifier, leak sensors with an automatic water shut-off, and a dashboard on the kitchen wall. It all runs locally, so the lights keep working when the internet doesn't.
What's public and what isn't
Public, and free for anyone to read or reuse:
- This website and its notes.
- Write-ups of our Home Assistant projects, with the YAML.
- The Mallow theme for linkding and the Mallow theme for Home Assistant.
- The brand files: the mark, wordmark and lockups in SVG.
Private: everything behind hub.mallownetwork.com. The hub sits behind a sign-in handled by Cloudflare Access, so nothing on it is reachable from the open internet without an account. If you've been given access, that's where to go. If you haven't, there's nothing there for you, and that's the point.
How it's built
- Small on purpose. Every service has to earn its place. Fewer moving parts means fewer things to update, back up and fix.
- Private by default. Things go behind the sign-in unless there's a good reason for them to be public.
- Pleasant to use. The tools share one look, a forest-green and parchment palette taken from the Appalachian ridges in the photo above, so the network feels like one place rather than a pile of default themes.
- Boring technology. This site is static HTML and CSS. It runs no JavaScript, sets no cookies and loads nothing from third parties. Here's how it's put together.
The name and the place
The network takes its look from the place it's run from: the long, layered ridges of the Appalachians, which reach across western Maryland. The mark is a mountain with a signal above it, which says the same thing as the tagline: rooted here, connected everywhere. More on the mark.