Colophon

This site is built with Astro and nothing else. There is no JavaScript framework, no UI library, and no CSS framework. The components are Astro files; the styles are vanilla CSS with custom properties. The MDX pipeline lets prose stay in plain Markdown while still allowing me to drop the occasional sidenote into the margin.

The body face is Newsreader, a variable serif with proper optical sizes — the family was drawn for long reading, and at 18px / 1.65 it stays out of the way. The UI face is Inter; code and metadata that benefit from a monospace use JetBrains Mono. All three are self-hosted as woff2 in /fonts/; nothing on the page calls Google's CDN.

The sidenotes are a borrowed convention. Edward Tufte uses them in his books to keep digressions out of the body but in sight. Gwern Branwen's site uses the same idea on the web, and his pages are the closest thing I've seen to a public archive built for decades. On wide screens the notes float in the right margin against their reference; on narrow screens they collapse to footnotes you can expand inline.

The aesthetic is deliberate. No metrics are surfaced anywhere on the site — no views, no subscribers, no engagement bar, no "popular posts" rail. There is no comments section, no Twitter share button, no newsletter capture. The argument for those things is usually that they make the work more visible. The counter-argument is that they gradually replace the work with the audience for it. I've made that trade before. I'm not making it again.

The content lives as plain Markdown files in a Git repository. The site compiles to static HTML and CSS. If the build tooling vanishes tomorrow, the essays remain readable. That is the durability bar I'm holding it to.