Colophon

A colophon is a publishing tradition: the note at the back of a book explaining how it was made, who set the type, what paper was used. This is that note for the web.

Built With

The site is generated by Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. Hugo compiles quickly, which is one of the reasons I’ve stayed with it since 2018. There is no database, no server-side rendering, no runtime dependencies.

Styles are plain, hand-written CSS—no framework, no utility classes—minified and fingerprinted through Hugo’s own asset pipeline. The same goes for the handful of scripts that run the theme. The source code lives on GitHub and deploys automatically to Cloudflare on every push to main.

Typography

The site uses the operating system’s native sans-serif stack for body text, headings, and interface elements: San Francisco on Apple platforms, Segoe UI on Windows, and the closest available system face elsewhere. Code uses the corresponding system monospace stack. There are no web-font downloads, which keeps the typography familiar and the page light.

Writing Environment

Content lives as flat Markdown files in the site’s repository. I write in Obsidian and publish directly to the site. There is no CMS, no admin interface, no database—just text files in a folder, versioned with Git. This keeps the writing environment and the publishing environment close together, which matters to me.

Design Decisions

Navigation sits in a compact top bar constrained to the same measure as the text. My cattle-brand mark and name link home; search and a small menu sit opposite them. The aim is to stay out of the way of the reading surface.

The palette uses Flexoki’s warm paper and ink tones: paper and black by day, black and base-200 by night. The site follows your system preference, with a toggle in the navigation to pin either mode. Links use red ink on light paper and gold on dark by default; book covers and essay images provide most of the remaining color.

Performance and environmental footprint informed many choices: system fonts eliminate a font payload, images use lazy loading and decoding="async", scripts are deferred, and the page weight on a typical post is kept small. The goal is a page that loads quickly on a slow connection and generates as little CO₂ as possible.

Inks

The accent colors borrow from Flexoki, Steph Ango’s ink-inspired palette. By default the site writes in red ink on light paper and gold on dark. If you’d rather read in a different ink, pick one below—each swatch shows its light and dark variants, and your choice sticks for future visits.

Content Types

Essays are longer, more considered pieces: things that took weeks or months to write and went through multiple drafts. They live at /:year/:month/:day/:slug/.

Microblog posts are the shorter stuff: quick notes and observations, and commonplace entries—links and passages worth keeping, named after the commonplace book tradition. They share the same URL structure as essays, so a note could someday grow into an essay without breaking any links.

Books are my reading log: what I’ve read, brief impressions, and metadata for looking things up later.

This is version 10 of the site, dating back to a WordPress site in 2008.