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

I am in the process of doing a full-on redesign of this blog (slowly and gradually), so the typography is a bit inconsistent at the moment. I was using Cooper Hewitt for a long time, which is a great typeface, but I am currently playing around with Recursive, which is an interesting 5-axis font inspired by signpainting! In my redesign, I want to include more hand-drawn sketches—the look and spirit of Recursive seems to align with my ambitions for redesigning this blog. I still need to figure out what to do for CJK text, but I feel like the handpainting feel of Recursive would go well with many of the CJK fonts out there. It’s just a matter of taking the time to find a good match, but since I don’t have much time to do that I am just using Source Han Sans for CJK texts in the meantime.

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.