Colophon

A colophon is the note at the back of a book that says how it was made. This is that note for this site.

Design

The layout is modelled on darioamodei.com, a site I admire for getting out of the way of the writing: one narrow column, a contents panel that follows you down long pieces, footnotes you can read without losing your place, and nothing else. I rebuilt it from scratch rather than copying it, and changed what I needed to.

There is a light and a dark theme. The site follows your system setting and lets you override it with the switch in the header; the choice is stored on your device only.

Type

Everything is set in Newsreader, a serif by Production Type released under the SIL Open Font License. Body text uses the 24-point optical size at 20 pixels; titles use the display cut. The fonts are served from this domain rather than from a font service, so no third party sees you read.

Code

The site is built with Astro and published as plain HTML files. Essays, posts and notes are written in Markdown. The build resizes images, turns standalone pictures into figures with captions, and draws a preview image for every page, so a link shared in a chat shows my name and the title of the piece.

There is no JavaScript framework on the page. A few small scripts add the contents panel, footnote tooltips, the theme switch and the image lightbox; the site reads fine with them switched off. The source is on GitHub, and the sitemap lists every page.

Hosting

The finished files are served by Cloudflare from its network of edge servers. Every push to the main branch rebuilds and deploys the site.

What it does not do

No analytics, no cookies of my own, no advertising, no newsletter pop-up, no comments. The privacy policy is short for that reason, and the accessibility statement says what I have done to make the pages usable by everyone.

Colophon for the colophon

Written by me in September 2026.