This site is designed and maintained out of a desire to learn and create. I am here to get my hands dirty, try things out, break some stuff. Here I will describe the values and motivation behind this blog, as well as the workflow and tooling involved.

Principles

for the soul

not for sale

This blog is non-commercial. I am not opposed to patronage, but this site will never be a source of income. I will never serve ads of any kind here. The only thing resembling “advertizing” that appears on this site is the promotion of ideas, books, bands, blogs, etc. that I think are work talking about.

no analytics

I have no interest in tracking visitors or monetizing traffic in any way. My server logs traffic, of course, but these logs are ephemeral and kept only for security and debugging purposes. I have no reason to track who visits my site from where. There isn’t much I can do with that information that is not creepy.

free cultural works

Everything I publish here I dedicate to the public domain. There may be some exceptions, but I aim to license everything here as permissively as possible. I also make all the code behind this site freely available. Sharing is caring.

discipline & simplicity

This site is and will always be a static site; meaning, it is a collection of virtual documents, not an application. This is simpler, more secure, and requires fewer resources. I don’t use any Javascript on this blog, and don’t plan on it. I am content working within the constraints of HTML, CSS, and the ocassional SVG. I validate the markup of all my content, and I do my best to keep it as robust and semantic as can be expected from an amateur such as myself. I appreciate the discipline, even if it makes for a steep learning curve sometimes.

diy not ai

This site is made by me. Not AI. I am here for the DIY. What the hell is life if you’re not going to do it yourself?

autonomy

This blog is my online identity. It’s a portfolio, a scrapbook, a soapbox, a memoir. I am here because I want to be. I host this site on my own server and do all the legwork to keep it running well. I don’t want to be locked into any platform or service. All the tools used to manage and maintain this site are free and open source software of one kind or another.

Production

site generation

This blog is generated using pandoc and hugo. Pandoc pre-processes my source markdown files and generates eprints of my articles. Hugo handles the conversion to HTML and everything else, such as the generation of atom feeds. The source files are version controlled using git and is available on codeberg. The hugo theme is custom; meaning, a crazy hodge podge of unkempt templates. It is not organized as a portable theme, but it may be a useful reference to someone getting started with hugo.

I use The Nu HTML Checker and other similar tools to routinely validate this site’s source code.

publishing

This blog is hosted by apache on a physical server running debian. Eprints for my articles are generated using pandoc and typst, and are syndicated to various archives such as philpapers.

This site is also available as a tor onion service:
wh62u2q2lmdhqu2moprye637d6ejbgaadlzfnvjyhxbvy3zrpoq7x3qd.onion

graphics

All the SVGs I make for this site are created using inkscape and/or written by hand.

Design

I enjoy tweaking the appearance of this blog and solving the problems that arise in the process.

typefaces

Currently, this site uses three different typefaces:

Cooper Hewitt is the main font in use. It is a very geometric, consistent sans serif that, to me, is very distinctive. It works great in headings, especially as heavy caps, but I think it is very easy on the eyes in prose.

Source Han Sans is what I use for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text on this site. I chose this font because it blends decently well with Cooper, but also because for a CJK font it is relatively lightweight (only 3.6MB or so). I wish that it was lighter, but being able to flow CJK text with Latin text is very important to me. I am not attached to this font, so one day I may swap it out if I find something lighter or figure out a way to load portions of it only for certain ranges of glyphs.

Mononoki is the monospace font in use here. I used it for years in my terminal once upon a time, and became very fond of it. I believe it was the font I used when composing my dissertation. I always liked that it has a somewhat rounded and even playful appearance. I decided to use it here because its soft edges work well with Cooper, although I try to use the two side-by-side only sparingly.

layout

I design this site so that it looks good on both narrow and wide screens. I avoid cluttering the page with eye candy, floating UI elements (like a menu button), etc. I think that text should have room to breathe. On wide screens, the title block is set apart form the main text in a separate column; the remainder of which is unused for the rest of the document. This ensures that the page doesn’t feel too claustrophobic.

I try to avoid visual distractions, especially in the flow of text. I don’t really use “callouts” or even asides anymore. I try to keep things neat, and not exactly minimal, but certainly moderate.

color scheme

When deciding on colors, I make sure that they at least meet the minimum accessiblity guidelines. Currently, the theme here relies on just the background and foreground colors, an alternative light text color, and a single accent color. I may introduce some variations of the accent color, with caution, but I think for a site like this less is more.