Colophon

A colophon is an old printing term, a little note at the back of a book where the printer tells you what typeface was used, what paper it was pressed on, how many copies were made. Nobody needs this information. That’s exactly why I like it. So: here’s the back page of this website.

Type

Headings are set in Newsreader, body text in Source Serif 4, both free and open from Google Fonts. I wanted the site to read a little like a letter rather than a dashboard with serifs, generous line height, nothing that shouts. If you’re on a device or connection where Google Fonts doesn’t load, everything falls back gracefully to Georgia. It’ll still be legible; it just won’t be quite as pretty.

Icons

The handful of icons you’ll find in the footer (RSS, LinkedIn, Instagram, Bluesky) are hand-coded inline SVGs, not an icon font or a component library. It’s a few more lines in the template, but it means no extra request, no unused glyphs shipped to your browser, and I know exactly what’s on the page.

Built with

This site is Eleventy under the hood: Markdown and Nunjucks templates, compiled to plain HTML at build time, styled with hand-written Sass. No client-side framework, no build-time JavaScript bloat, no hydration. It’s deployed to Cloudflare, and the newsletter runs on beehiiv. That’s more or less the whole stack. There’s no analytics on this site, no trackers, no cookie banner asking your permission to do the thing it shouldn’t be doing anyway. If you want to know whether people read something, you can just ask them.

Dark mode is a real toggle, not a media-query afterthought. It remembers what you picked. The RSS feed is not a legacy artifact; it’s a first-class citizen, and if you still use a reader, I love you for it.

On blogging, open source, and the open web

I’ve spent most of my career building things. Reaction Commerce, back when I was its co-founder and CEO, was an open commerce engine, and I’ve never quite lost the instinct to want to see how a thing works underneath. This website is small and doesn’t need to be complicated, so it isn’t. It runs on boring, dependable, open-source software written by people who mostly didn’t get paid for it, and I don’t take that for granted.

I also think blogging, actual blogging, on your own domain, in your own words, not a thread, not a post optimized for an algorithm you don’t control, is a quietly radical act these days. It’s slower. It reaches fewer people. It also can’t be deleted by a platform’s policy change, can’t be de-ranked, doesn’t come with an ad next to it. I write here because I want to, not because it performs well, and I’d rather have a hundred people read something I actually mean than have ten thousand skim something built to be read by nobody in particular. If that sounds old-fashioned, good. The open web could use a few more people acting like it’s still worth showing up to.

Also

If something looks broken, or a font is doing something strange on your particular phone, tell me, I’d genuinely like to know. And if you’ve read this far, you are exactly the kind of person this website was built for.