Colophon

Almost everything you need to know about me and my current work can be found on the homepage or under one of the menu options above. Please feel free to send me an e-mail or connect with me on Mastodon anytime.

The main text content on this website is typeset in LL Bradford. Designed based on 1884’s Römische Antiqua by the swiss type designer Laurenz Brunner, it is “an all-purpose serif font family conceived as a versatile tool for high-volume text setting.” Developed and refined over ten years, LL Bradford was intended to “transpose the physical presence and distinctive character of hot metal type into the digital realm.” I have always wanted to draw on the styles of book typesetting for this website and this fantastically readable typeface is apt for such a project. LL Bradford is licensed from Lineto.

LL Akkurat is used on this website in two weights for the interface and for accompanying text across the board. Akkurat, designed by Laurenz Brunner and licensed from Lineto, combines “the qualities of classic sans-serif craft with a new contemporaneity” prioritising “technical precision, down-to-earth robustness, reliability and neutrality” over trendiness. Like Bradford above, I think Akkurat too is a wonderfully readable typeface that adds charm to the page even when used solely for interface elements.

Monospaced text, such as `code and stuff` are set in the beautiful Input Mono by DJR licensed via Adobe Fonts. I also happen to use this typeface locally on VS Code, which I use to develop this website, and Emacs, where I do a major part of my work.

Once upon a time my workflow for editing and managing this website involved the Atom code editor, iA Writer, Gitlab, Netlify and what not. With real life getting in the way I decided to simplify things and switch from Hugo to a GUI- and Tailwind-powered website engine. My answer was Statamic. This now my one-stop management and writing space for the most part.

The advantage of this is that I can switch devices with ease without having to push and pull via Git. However, I do use Git to fix bugs, update Statamic or occasionally, such as during periodic backups. These are things one makes time for rather than routine updating and publishing, which is handled with greater ease thanks to Statamic’s excellent dashboard.

As for images, I usually run them through ImageOptim at some point to shrink them down to a more palatable size for websites. This requires my computer rather than my iPad (which I’m comfortable using quite often) so I am currently on the lookout for a simpler, cross-platform solution to this. But this is not a priority because I use fewer images in my essays and notes of late, in a bid to keep page sizes low and ensure that this website remains climate friendly.

Maintaining the site via code updates is restricted to my Mac in case of major changes that call for lots of testing. I used to use Atom (and Brackets before that) but now I use VS Code for updating, testing, designing and improving. I maintain a manual log—a sort of lab notes if you will—on Emacs. Programming of course means working quite a bit in the Terminal as well, and more so since I moved to a new VPS. Part of the reason why web design and development is restricted to my Mac is the fact that iPadOS does not support running a local server yet, at least as of iPadOS 16 17 18.

Compared to my past workflows I find this to be mature, streamlined, simple and straightforward, which makes maintenance and updating (including writing new stuff) easy and incredibly quick. That last part—a quick workflow—ensures I can care for this website without sacrificing too much time or putting in an unjustifiable lot of effort. To those of you who e-mail me asking how I manage all this, the answer is simple: find a workflow that is efficient for you.

While nearly all content on this website is my own, I enjoy highlighting others’ works when doing so is legally permissible—or I have explicit permission. Particularly for essays, cover images usually showcase a related work that I like from other artists.

Due credit is provided in all places where others’ work is used. If you noticed that your work was used but not credited to your satisfaction please write to me and I will quickly set things in order.

This website runs on flat files rather than databases. It was built on a Mac, then rebuilt and then rebuilt again—all also on a Mac—mostly because I cannot help myself from constantly tinkering with it. All content is hosted from a private server operated by Hetzner using 100% green electricity, a key decision in making this one of the most climate friendly websites currently on the internet.

For its first ten years this website ran on WordPress, the excellent, free and open-source CMS. Between 2017 and 2019 it ran on the much slimmer, quicker, more straightforward (and database-free) system, Kirby. In an attempt to avoid Kirby’s license fee inflation and migration headaches from v2.0 to v3.0—and, above all else, to escape its non-standard YAML front-matter fomat—I decided to move to a static website powered by Hugo. This originally proved to make writing, website design and management all a pleasure once again. The problem with Hugo was that it did not give me enough time to focus on my other interests because I could not write unless I sat down at whatever system I had unpushed git commits on.

I decided that I needed the best of both worlds: a back-end that communicates well with my existing Hugo content files; a robust and modern framework that supports Tailwind (etc.) as a core step rather than as an afterthought; and a neat GUI that I can acess more freely. I found the perfect answer in Statamic which currently powers this website. Statamic brings the flat-file advantages of Kirby with the dashboard flexibility of a program like Craft (another great solution but one that uses a database). Unlike Kirby, Statamic uses standard YAML which made it effortless for me to continue using my existing Hugo content files without an added ‘migration’ step, and unlike Kirby it has excellent asset management which is important to me, especially for my photography.

Some icons used on this website were sourced from Icon SVG.

If you subscribe to my newsletter you will be part of a Kit-powered newsletter management system which is safe, secure and private.

This website also has full SSL to ensure you are always on a secure connection.

For more, please read the privacy policy.