Colophon: a working instrument

A colophon is the note at the back of a book that tells you how it was made: the typeface, the paper, the press. This is that note, for this site.

The idea

I wanted a personal site that behaves like a working instrument rather than a brochure. An instrument earns trust by being honest about its own state — a good one shows you real readings, not a picture of a needle painted at a flattering angle. So the rule here is that every piece of decoration has to be real information. The clock in the header is the actual time in England. The counts next to the navigation are computed from the number of things I have actually made. The line at the bottom of every page is the real timestamp of the last build and the short hash of the commit it was built from. If you can see it, it is true.

The opposite of that is the fake widget: the invented metric, the placeholder graph, the “trusted by” logos nobody checked. There is none of that here. Where I do not yet have a fact — a start date, an institution, the exact wording of a role — the page stays sparse and I leave a note to myself in the source rather than filling the gap with something plausible.

The look

The visual language is borrowed from three places, synthesised rather than copied. The first is the index page of a photography archive: off-white paper, near-black ink, and a thin monospace layer of labels and metadata framing the work. The second is the printed manifesto — type set large and plainly, a few lines that mean what they say. The third is instrument design in the older industrial sense: everything legible, nothing ornamental, the controls doing exactly what their labels claim.

Texture is rationed deliberately. There is exactly one place on the site that looks handled — the current note on the Now page, which is a scrap of yellow paper with a strip of tape. Everywhere else is flat and editorial. One warm spot in an otherwise cool room reads as deliberate; the same texture repeated everywhere reads as a template, which is the thing I was most trying to avoid.

The build

It is an Astro site and it ships effectively no JavaScript. There is no front-end framework. The scripts on the page are a handful of lines of vanilla JavaScript: the live clock, the theme toggle (including the cassette on the home page that flips the site between Side A and Side B), the work ticker along the bottom of the hero that scrubs between recent projects, and the record player on the Now page. All of it together is under four kilobytes on the heaviest page — comfortably under the ten I would let myself spend.

The fonts are self-hosted — Archivo for display and interface, IBM Plex Mono for all the labels and metadata, and Newsreader for long-form reading like this — so no request leaves the site to anyone else’s servers as you read it. There is one deliberate exception, and it waits for your permission: press PLAY on the record player on the Now page and it loads Spotify’s embedded player for that track on demand. Nothing loads from Spotify, or anyone, until you press it. Colour and theming are plain CSS custom properties, with a light “Side A” and a dark “Side B” that you can switch between; your choice is remembered. There is an RSS feed for the writing, a print stylesheet that turns the CV into a clean black-on-white document, and the build stamp and commit hash I mentioned, injected at build time.

None of this is novel. That is rather the point — it is boring technology used carefully, which is what I like. Everything on this site works, and it can show you its own workings. That is the whole brief.