Pongal Malar
A fully static website - HTML, CSS, embedded PDF viewer - built so the Tokyo Tamil community can browse and read all 15+ years of Pongal Malar publications online, at zero hosting cost.
- Client
- Pongal Malar
- Scope
- Static Website
- Stack
- Static HTML/CSS, PDF viewer
- Duration
Executive Summary
Pongal Malar is an annual Tamil-language publication for the Tokyo Tamil community, now in its 33rd year, celebrating Pongal - the Tamil harvest festival - with cultural writing, artwork, and community contributions. Tsukuba Tech delivered a static website development project so readers could browse and read every edition, going back to 2011, directly in the browser - no CMS, no backend, no hosting cost.
This case study covers how a static site built with plain HTML, CSS and an embedded PDF viewer can be the right technical choice for a publication archive, not a compromise - fast to load, free to host, and simple for a small community organization to keep running year after year.
The Customer
Pongal Malar has published for the Tokyo Tamil community since 2011, marking the Pongal harvest festival with an annual anthology distributed at community celebrations across Japan. Each year's edition previously existed only as a standalone PDF, shared informally and with no central place online where past editions could be found or read together.
As a community publication rather than a commercial business, Pongal Malar needed a website that matched its actual scale: something simple to maintain, free to run, and built around one core need - letting people read the magazine, this year's and every year before it.
The Challenge
A 33-year publication archive with no online home is a real loss - each PDF, however well designed, was effectively invisible to anyone who didn't already have the link. Pongal Malar needed a public website where every edition could be browsed by year, read directly in the browser, and downloaded, without asking readers to hunt down individual PDF files.
At the same time, the organization did not need or want the overhead of a full content management system, a database, or ongoing hosting costs for a website that primarily needs to display a yearly publication and its archive.
The Solution
Tsukuba Tech built a fully static website - static HTML and CSS with an embedded PDF viewer - matched exactly to what Pongal Malar actually needed. The homepage highlights the current 33rd-year edition, while a dedicated library page lets readers filter and browse every annual edition back to 2011, each one readable inline or downloadable as a PDF.
Because the site has no backend, no database, and no CMS, it costs nothing to host and requires effectively no maintenance - a deliberate, right-sized technical decision rather than a limitation. For a yearly community publication, static website development was the correct engineering choice, not just the cheapest one.
Results & Impact
Pongal Malar's full 15-year publication history is now browsable in one place for the first time, with the current 33rd-year edition front and center on the homepage. Readers can filter by year, read an edition inline through the embedded PDF viewer, or download it - all from a site that costs nothing to host and needs no ongoing technical maintenance.
For a community organization running a yearly cultural publication, that combination - a real online archive, zero running cost, and no CMS to manage - is the outcome that actually matters, delivered through a deliberately simple static website rather than an over-built platform.
“I worked with Tsukubatech for building the website for the Pongal Celebrations in Tokyo. Dheeraj modernized the website with a neat and upbeat look. Great job!”
— Govind Rajan, Pongal Malar