Colophon

What's under the hood

Framework

Built with Astro for full control over the output, no CMS bloat, and no database to maintain. Content lives in plain Markdown files, which keeps things portable, flexible, and easy to reason about. shadcn/ui provides accessible component primitives built on Radix UI, with full ownership of the source code. Tailwind keeps styling co-located with markup, no stylesheet juggling, no naming things.

Styling

Darkmode by Dalton Maag is a highly legible humanist sans typeface designed for modern UIs. Its weight variable axis delivers clear visual hierarchy. GSAP handles motion, scroll-driven transitions and small micro-interactions that would be brittle in pure CSS. RemixIcon is a versatile icon library by a small team that treats open source as a core belief, not an afterthought.

Infrastructure

Umami measures visits without cookies and never stores personal information. It is open source and self-hosted on a server in Québec, so visit data stays in Canada and no third party sees it. This site's source lives on GitHub, with deployments triggered automatically on push via Vercel and distributed across the edge.

APIs

Web3Forms handles contact and AMA form submissions without requiring a backend.

Editorial

Every article targets Grade 8 readability through Hemingway, cutting adverbs, passive voice, and qualifiers. Claude checks facts and surfaces references worth linking. Etymonline traces where a word actually came from before it gets used loosely. Google Ngram Viewer flags whether a phrase is current or dated by charting its usage over centuries. iA Writer strips away distractions and keeps the focus on the text itself. Merriam-Webster keeps word choices precise without reaching for jargon.

The editorial stance favours scrutiny over self-expression. Notes are not personal journals. They ask questions, often the wrong ones, and resist the urge to arrive at tidy conclusions. The goal is curiosity that holds up over time or speaks to what matters right now, not both at once, and never about what I had for lunch.

License

All content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0. Meaning, you are free to share it with credit, but not for commercial use and not in modified form.

Timeline

328 posts since December 1, 2024

Changelog

  • Added Grave Browser, Everybody Hertz, Playfolio, Commitment Issues, Typechase, Folios, Settings Overview, Brand Slam, PARANOISE SPECTROID, Irogasane, Sensible XI, Marie Curious, Motus Axis, and Gridget Bardot to Projects
  • Redesigned Death & Taxes Canada, HAIL 9000, Plot Twist, Shartup, Rizzle, Tiloji, Hex or Not, Hex Appeal, and Chroma Census, each now marked V2
  • Added demo videos, Launch buttons, and Previous and Next links to project pages
  • Reworked About into a Commodore 64 style greeting, with a blinking portrait, tooltips, and isometric recaps for each section
  • Added a Tools and Stack switch to the Colophon, with an isometric drawing of how the sites are built
  • Split Workshop into six sections and added a Tees gallery
  • Added nine apps to Tools, including a bigger Self-Hosted section
  • Limited Contact messages to 140 characters and added a choice of what the message is about
  • Removed Ozjective and ozg.fyi, both now retired
  • New share image