Colophon
A colophon is a brief statement about how a book was produced. In this case it explains how this website was made.
This website was first published in the fall of 2011 in Waco, Texas. It was built on a self-hosted server using WordPress. It’s gone through several iterations over the years as a blog and portfolio, and I’ve rebuilt it a few times. I designed and built the current version myself with a focus on minimizing its carbon footprint.
Everything is open source and published on GitHub if you’d like to poke around.
Design
The theme is inspired by antique field guides and paper notebooks, and designed to showcase text and code on digital screens. The color palette is loosely based on Flexoki by Steph Ango, particularly for accent colors and code highlighting. The biggest difference is in the gray scale—I created a custom neutral range with less saturation in the backgrounds, which I find gentler on the eyes.
Typography
All fonts are self-hosted for privacy and performance. The body copy is set in Literata by TypeTogether. UI elements are in Inter by Rasmus Andersson.
Technologies
I optimized the site for performance and a low carbon footprint. I use Jekyll to generate static files, deployed via Netlify. Images are served by Cloudinary.
To keep things lightweight, I built the theme with Tailwind CSS (resulting in less than 10KB of CSS) and use vanilla JavaScript instead of heavy libraries. Page sizes typically stay under 200KB, with a 500KB maximum.
All posts are written in markdown for portability. My content management system (CMS) is a bunch of files and folders on my operating system. I use GitHub for version control and backups.
License
The code for this website is released under the MIT License. If you republish any of the content on this site, please provide an author credit and a link back to this site.