Colophon

/ˈkɒləf(ə)n/ n. sing. A statement at the end of a book giving information about its authorship and printing

Hello

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.

Typefaces

The main text content on this website is typeset in Make Way, designed by Yassin Baggar with Anton Koovit et. al. and licensed from his Fatype foundry. The accompanying and UI typeface is GT America, designed by Noël Leu with Seb McLauchlan and licensed from Grilli Type.

Parts of Make Way are still under construction—especially superscripts, subscripts and small caps—but I have been informed by Yassin that these are in the works. For now therefore this website makes use of uppercase letters and styled faux superiors.

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 on VS Code which I use to develop this website—Input Mono is free for private use.

Workflow

Once upon a time my workflow in 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 but only while fixing bugs, updating Statamic or other one-off instances. These are things one makes time for rather than routine updating and publishing, which is handled with greater ease thanks to Statamic.

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.

Maintenance

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. This of course means working quite a bit in the Terminal. 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 17.

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.

External credits

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.

Set-up

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 by a green webhost in the Netherlands, a key decision in making this website 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 to escape its non-standard YAML front-matter fomat— I decided to move to a static website model 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.

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. I found the perfect answer in Statamic, so this website is powered by the Statamic v4.0 flat-file system.

Third-party

Icons used on this website were sourced from Icon SVG.

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