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 primary typeface used across this website is Equity. It is an old-style serif typeface based on the classic Ehrhardt released in 1938 by the British Monotype Corporation. I fell in love with Ehrhardt when I first came across it in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cicero’s On obligations and found Equity to be a fantastic digital equivalent for it (the Monotype digital version does no justice to the original in my opinion).

Equity was designed by Matthew Butterick who says “Ehrhardt was the primary influence on Equity ... [which] follows the Morison principle of being a practical font.” Once you start to read it, in my opinion, Equity is an incredibly readable typeface that is the closest I have seen to a typeface that reminds me of reading a book without becoming gimmicky on screens.

Accompanying Ehrhardt are two other typefaces also by Mr Butterick, Concourse, a duplexed sans-serif typeface ideal for text, buttons and other UI elements across this website and Triplicate, a one-of-a-kind monospaced typeface that I use not only on this website but also on my text editor where I write my essays, notes and book reviews. For more, read about my workflow below.

Most of my writing starts either on the excellent Statamic dashboard or on BBEdit (since I moved from iA Writer). This allows me to manage my workflow across devices without worrying about pushing via git and involves either management directly on the website or through SFTP and SSH since this website runs on a flat file structure.

When working with images I usually resize them with Preview.app and then run them through a fine-tuned ImageOptim set-up to reduce file sizes before converting them to webp with one click using an excellent webp convertor. Besides my photography there are few places where I prefer to use images in a bid to ensure 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. My coding workflow is git-based. I used to use Atom (and Brackets before that) but now I use VS Code for updating, testing, designing and improving, along with its excellent remote SSH feature. I maintain a manual log—a sort of lab notes if you will—on BBEdit to help me keep track of things and stay organised.

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 or Streamline icons.

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