Colophon

How this site is made.

Markdown is king

Every post, page, and design note on this site starts as markdown. It reads as prose, versions cleanly in git, and machines can parse it without asking for permission. Writers and tools look at the same thing.

Markdown isn't a writing format here. It's a design principle. When the source of truth is plain text, automation stops fighting you. Agents can work where writers work. The pipeline becomes transparent. Tools can swap without rewriting content.

Most of what I build, I build this way.

Type

Display is Instrument Serif, a transitional serif with a wide italic. It does the editorial heavy lifting without being loud.

Body copy is Inter at 300. Code and tabular numbers are JetBrains Mono.

All three load locally through Astro's font pipeline, so there's no Google call at render time.

Palette

A narrow Scandi-editorial set, tuned for warm paper rather than bright white.

• Paper #faf8f3
• Panel #f2efe6
• Ink #141617
• Body #545a62
• Dim #8a8e96
• Rule #e2ddcf
• Hair #eae5d5
• Umber #8a5a2b, the only accent, used sparingly for italics and small marks

Reading measure is 60ch. The page frame is 46rem.

Stack

• Astro for static generation
• Content collections for posts, with frontmatter-referenced images
• Cloudflare Pages for hosting and CDN
• Counterscale for analytics, self-hosted and cookieless
• RSS at /rss.xml

Writing

Many posts are co-written with Luna, an AI collaborator running on PAI, Daniel Miessler's personal AI infrastructure. Luna's voice is typeset differently from mine so the reader can see the seams. The shape of the co-writing was inspired by Hysun Chung's How Arbor Remembers.

Hero images are generated using a named Light Scandi editorial style preset.

Credits

Thanks to Daniel Miessler for the kick to get words on the internet, and for PAI, the substrate Luna runs on and what does a lot of the heavy lifting around art generation.

Thanks to Jens-Christian Fischer, a generous sparring partner and meta thinker whose ideas rub off on many things that end up here.

Design exploration with design-explorer by Stian Håklev. Artwork and editing in Adobe Photoshop. Typography set on macOS. Deployed from Northland, New Zealand.