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🌍 Earth — aguidetocloud.com

"What overflows lands here. For people like us." — Sush's homepage spine metaphor

Earth is the warm, patient origin world. Everything Sush has built so far lives here: 56 free tools, 66 mind maps, 9 cert paths (study guides), the Zen design system, the testimonials, the public blog, the YouTube cross-link.

Every other planet in the cosmos was born here — most as a section that grew its own gravity until it had to leave. Earth stays the home anyone can come back to.

What it is, in one screen

Surface What it does
aguidetocloud.com/ The home — newsletter pitch, featured tools, blog cards, certs, "what overflows lands here" hero
aguidetocloud.com/<slug>/ Per-cert hub — one page per certification (AZ-900, AZ-104, AI-900, etc.)
aguidetocloud.com/blog/ The blog — long-form guides, post-launch notes, M365 walkthroughs
aguidetocloud.com/guided/ The paid moon — see Guided →
aguidetocloud.com/copilot-feature-matrix/ Tools — 56 of them. Most-loved: Feature Matrix, Roadmap Tracker, Licensing Simplifier
aguidetocloud.com/about/ Why this exists, who Sush is, what he's not
aguidetocloud.com/admin/ Sveltia CMS — content editor for the team

Identity

Element Decision
Atmosphere Soft, patient, giving, hope. Reading-room calm. Indigo accent on white-paper warmth (light) / soft charcoal (dark).
Design system The Zen System — "a cherry blossom tree, not a jungle." Indigo #6366F1 light / #818CF8 dark. No per-tool accents. No glassmorphism. No gradients. 8-px spacing grid.
Type Inter (display + body), Cascadia Code (code blocks)
Voice register First-person, plain English, almost no jargon. Sush's coffee-chat tone. Honest take. No salesy framing.
Theme Light default, dark via toggle. Both modes are first-class — every change must work in both.

Belief language (the universal anchor)

Earth's voice is the canonical voice the rest of the cosmos echoes (in their own dialects).

  • No gatekeeping. Almost everything free. The one paid product (Practice Exams, $9) is priced to remove the gate, not protect it.
  • Plain English. "For people like us — not power users, not developers."
  • Honest take. Hard truth > polite deflection. "I had to look this up three times before it clicked" > "This concept is straightforward."
  • The intern in every room. Even after 18+ years in IT, Sush still writes from the intern's chair, not the expert's pulpit.
  • No brag. Self-stat blocks are out. Voices (testimonials with handles) and day-job framing are in.
  • Quality over speed. The 19-step pre-push checklist exists because past pain made it necessary.

Drift symptoms to watch for: - Marketing words like frontier · ecosystem · multimodal · agentic · capability · in layman's · AI-powered · robust · scalable · holistic · synergies · game changer · mission-critical - Numbers used as authority signals ("100K subs", "used by 2M+") - Forced enthusiasm ("Get started today!")

For the full voice doc, see Voice & Tone.

Cosmos placement

Earth is the gravitational centre. Other planets:

  • Link back to Earth in their footer (brand attribution)
  • Render Earth's "A" badge in their masthead (per Cosmos Nav Playbook)
  • Inherit the [cosmos] config (newsletter URL, feedback link, parent site)
  • Are NOT required to look like Earth — each picks its own atmosphere

The two paid products live on Earth: 1. Practice Exams ($9) — the 100% availability SLA product. Any change touching the practice quiz, question JSON, build pipeline, or checkout flow follows the Practice Exam SLA protocol. See Deployment Playbook and the SLA section in ~/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md. 2. (Future paid courses) — same SLA discipline applies whenever they ship.

Cosmos law #6 protects them: no paid content crosses cosmic boundaries via free pathways. No other planet may reference, paraphrase, or surface paid material — not even by accident.

One Body, Two Organs (Earth + Moon)

Earth and the Guided Moon are one product, two organs — Hugo and Astro under one chrome. Any change to nav, footer, fonts, tokens, theme toggle, or shared chrome MUST be applied to BOTH platforms in the SAME commit/session. Pre-commit gate: "Did I touch the matching organ?" If no → DO NOT push.

Source of truth for the parity: zen-system-quickref.md.

Architecture, in one paragraph

Earth is a Hugo static site (aguidetocloud-revamp repo). The Moon (Guided) is an Astro app (guided repo) that lives at /guided/ via Cloudflare Pages routing. Both deploy to Cloudflare Pages. Newsletter goes to Beehiiv (URL stored in [cosmos] config so it can swap to Buttondown in a 5-file edit). Content edits go through Sveltia CMS at /admin/. The Zen design system is the parity contract between Hugo and Astro.