Colophon

A colophon traditionally appears at the end of a book, providing details about its production. In the spirit of that tradition, this page documents the technologies and design decisions that went into this website.

Motivation

I've been using a mishmash of sites to host content and serve it on my domain. My blog has moved from Blogger to Medium to Tumblr. I've been posting ratings and reviews on ImDB and Goodreads for more than a decade. There are two key motivations for the current state of this site: 1. Cloud exit - I wanted to host my own blog posts, movies, reviews, etc. because I felt that the current social contract on the internet is being violated. 2. Digital Garden - I was inspired by Maggie Appleton's digital garden and wanted to setup something similar for myself.

Technologies

The site uses the Astro web framework as its base. Maggie's site uses it, I studied Astro a bit and found it appropriate for my design goals. Other static site generators like Hugo and Gatsby are focused on text. I wanted to use APIs, include dynamic components, and generally go beyond just loading text. So Astro with its "Islands architecture" and support for modern JavaScript frameworks felt like a good balance. I then scoured heaven and earth to find an Astro theme I could build on top of, finally settling on "Astro-nano" which was very well documented, simple, and fast. After that I used Claude Code to build the site. All the technology choices after that (MDX, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, etc.) are either inherited from the Astro-nano theme or chosen by Claude Code with occasional assistance from Github Copilot

The site code is currently hosted in a (private) Github repo and deployed via Vercel

Design

The design of this site is a work in progress. I looked at what inspires me, reflected on my life values and then setup an inspiration dump in Figma. The two themes I settled on "Erudition" reflecting my love for books and knowledge; and "Solarpunk" reflecting my hope for a more optimistic pleasant future. Instead of choosing between them, I decided to turn a bug (indecision) into a feature (variety) by adding a theme picker to the site!