Colophon

This website is a pretty discreet pile of code holding together a couple of decades of personal ramblings and nonsense (2003 to date with a decade plus gap from 2014 to 2026). Here’s how it’s all put together.

Typography Choices

Headings are set to use your system default Sans Serif font (San Francisco on Mac and Segoe UI on Windows), body text meanwhile is set in Lora (falling back to Georgia or you next available serif option).

Site Framework

The site itself is built with Astro. Every post is a simple Markdown file with a bit of YAML at the top (title, date, tags etc) which Astro turns into plain static HTML at build time. There’s no database and no server doing anything clever. I’m not using any fancy pants CSS framework, just good old plain vanilla CSS.

Website Deployment

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, deployed by a GitHub Action every time I push (or overnight, in case I’ve dated a post ahead of time and its date has arrived). During deployment any inline images over 800px get scaled automatically using Sharp. Once deployment it done, I ping IndexNow so new posts turn up more quickly on search surfaces than they would otherwise.

Pagefind handles on site search (that’s the little magnifying glass, or ⌘K), creating an index at deploy time which can be queried using the Pagefind JavaScript search API.

Post Tags

The site is architected around a corpus of new and historical post tags, I regularly review tags to make sure I don’t end up with meaningless groupings with only a handful of posts. While I’ve not touched the body content of historical posts, I have audited and consolidated historical tags.

Analytics

There’s a Google Analytics tag in the header at the moment, though I’d like to switch this out for something less intrusive when I have time.

LLM Site Summary

There’s a machine-readable site summary at /llms.txt following the emerging llms.txt standard, for AI systems that crawl or index the site.