about
infolato is a free online encyclopedia on the asalato, a West African shaker percussion instrument. It is a living document, and continually edited and updated.
infolato aims to be as accessible and comprehensive as possible. infolato is created and maintained by Sebastian Zhang.
This website is a labor of love, and something that I do in my free time. Information present may be imperfect, incomplete, or inaccurate, and there may be bugs in the website. Submit suggestions and bug reports to [email protected].
mascot
When I first started learning the asalato in 2019, I quickly ran out of English-language resources. I spent most of my time finding new videos of playing, and stumbled upon following the Japanese asalato hashtag (#アサラト) on Instagram. This worked well, except for one small problem.
It was filled with pictures of shoebill storks.
And the storks were popular too! Sometimes I had to scroll thorough pages of stork pictures in order to find asalato videos.
I was confused: why was this bird here?
One day, I saw yet another shoebill stork post, but it included a few other shoebill storks too. It was a post on four shoebill storks, with the following names:
Bongo, Marimba, Caxixi...and Asalato.
This shoebill stork—one specific shoebill stork—was named asalato (and filling up the hashtag, for a short while). The little rabbit hole investigation that it led me on—it reminds me of how I first discovered asalato. As a tribute to Asalato (the shoebill stork), infolato's mascot takes the same species.
technical
This website was built using a static site generator called Eleventy. The search bar was built using Pagefind. Vector images were created using Inkscape, and score examples were engraved using MuseScore. Helicopter (the mascot) was drawn using Krita and Inkscape.
This website was originally created on June 3, 2025.