Colophon

This is a static site built with Zola.

Philosophy

I'm tired of complex, bloated websites. My goal for this site is to build something simple, hackable, and fast.

I want to make it easy for folks to read the code for this site, learn from it, and adapt it for their own needs. One of the principles of the indieweb is making your own websites, and I'm a big fan of lowering the barrier to entry. Sites that are obfuscated by complex build pipelines, transpiled languages, and minification make it harder to understand and adapt.

I also want this to be a site for everyone. In addition to typical web accessibility considerations, I want this site to be light enough to load quickly on a range of devices; the median web user does not use a $1000 smartphone on a 5G connection. I also want to respect users who prefer to keep JavaScript disabled, so any use of JavaScript should be minimal and optional.

To avoid complex build pipelines and improve hackability, this site does not use Sass, CSS frameworks, or TypeScript, it doesn't have any JS dependencies, and it doesn't do any bundling or minifying. Those are all useful tools that I would happily reach for on a larger project, but they're not necessary for a site of this complexity.

The privacy of my users is also important to me, so I don't use analytics or tracking scripts on this site. I use Hyvor Talk for comments, which is a privacy-focused alternative to services like Disqus, and I have IP logging disabled.

Features

Here are some of the cool and less-obvious features of this site:

Atom for web feeds (I use the term "RSS" on the site because it's more widely recognized). I love web feeds and wish more people used them.
XSLT stylesheet to render the Atom feed as a web page. This is a very cool and underutilized feature of browsers that allows you to define a stylesheet which renders an XML document as an XHTML document client-side, without JS.
Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata for rich previews when sharing links.
JSON-LD to provide machine-readable metadata.
Theme picker for changing the site's color scheme. The site is built using the standard 16-color ANSI palette, so it's easy to add pretty much any standard terminal color scheme.