Colophon

This site is built using a static site generator which I write in Python. The beauty of this, for the purposes of this colophon, is that it is in a real sense exactly what you see here: HTML pages on a website, styled with CSS, and with very minor JavaScript needed to do things like render equations (though I’m working on doing this statically too). You can inspect the source and the styles and there’s nothing more to it. I try to use “correct” semantic HTML for reasons of personal style and accessibility.

I’m tweaking the style all the time, but it’s currently intended to be typeset in Hoefler Text, but if you don’t have that it’ll be some other typeface you do have. The specific style isn’t important enough to serve font files when you’ve plenty already.

I write posts in MarkEdit, tinker with the SSG using PyCharm, tinker with the style using Nova and upload the built files to my webserver using Transmit.

It’s hosted by Kualo on web-servers powered by renewable energy (better than nothing). The domain is rented through Hover. It costs me about £110 per year for hosting and domain registration, although that hosting package also includes around 30 other websites I host for myself, friends and relatives, so it’s closer to about £40 per year for this site alone.

It currently uses about this much power to visit:

And most of that is taken up by third-party javascript needed for video embeds. I’m working on ways to make it more efficient. My goal is A+, which I achieved on my other website, which is handwritten in pure PHP.

You can subscribe to updates using RSS: look for a link at the bottom of each page.

I don’t use LLMs in the creation of this website.

For a long time this site was served with Wordpress, but I stopped enjoying that.

Style guide

I like that Robin Sloan has a personal style guide on his website’s colophon. I have a more complete style guide offline, but here are some specific choices which you may think are mistakes but are not: