Colophon

This page covers the nuts and bolts of how the site works. People often ask what stack I use, so here’s the full setup.

The site is created with Pure Blog and served from a VPS at Hetzner. The theme is hand-rolled, lightweight, and built for fast builds and minimal overhead. Some traffic is routed through Bunny CDN which handles global caching and keeps latency low.

Email sending

Whenever I publish a new post, the entire thing is sent out via email too. I'm a firm believer that as writers, we should allow people to subscribe in a way that makes most sense to them. That's why I offer email subscriptions. They aren't a newsletter, they're just a regurgitation of the posts I write.

The emailing system is powered by Sendy and uses Amazon SES to send the emails. I previously used Buttondown, which is also very good.

Cross-posting

When I publish a post, it's automatically cross-posted to a number of places, mainly so I don't have to remember (or bother) to do it myself.

• Normal posts are cross-posted to Mastodon via a custom RSS feed and a PHP script that checks for new posts regularly. This automation publishes the post description and a link.
• Similarly, I have another PHP script that checks my main RSS feed for new content regularly, then generates and sends a new email in Sendy.
• Notes are immediately posted in full (including images) to Mastodon via a Pure Blog hook.

Previously I used EchoFeed which worked ok, but did tend to break now and then, so I decided it would be easier (and free) to implement my own cross-posting system.

Design

The design of this site has evolved a lot over the years. I enjoy tweaking and improving it, and being nostalgic, I’ve kept a full design history for anyone who wants to see how things have changed.

The goal of the current design is a mostly brutalist look with a hint of whimsy to keep things interesting. I like the simplicity of the layout. There are a few features here and there to help readers, but I try to keep the focus firmly on the content.

Design choices

No website is completely unique. Every design draws inspiration from things the creator has seen, whether that’s deliberate or not. This site is no different.

The font stack uses Iosevka as the primary typeface, followed by a local monospace font stack.

The colour palette for the theme is my own creation, and I think it works well with the overall look and feel of the site: