Colophon

What it weighs

Stylesheet

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Icon fonts

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Text fonts

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JavaScript

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Dependencies

0

No npm, no lockfile, nothing to audit

Build step on deploy

None

Pages serves the repository as written

The main stylesheet is authored; the served file is generated by inlining the vendor CSS and then deleting every rule whose selector matches nothing on the site. The icon fonts are subset to the glyphs actually used, which is where most of that saving comes from. Nothing is minified beyond the stylesheet, because the numbers above did not justify the extra moving part.

What is in it

Pages

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Posts

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Words

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Reading time

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End to end, at 220 words a minute

Series

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Topics

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Photographs

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Posts with a live demo

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The writing

First post

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Posts a month

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Averaged across the whole run

Average post

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words

Longest

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Shortest

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Commits

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How it was built, month by month

Every commit to the repository, by month. The site was a single page for years; the writing, the tooling and most of what the rest of this page describes arrived in one long push through 2026.

What it runs on

The build

There is no build on deploy, but there is one before a commit. — scripts generate what would otherwise be maintained by hand, and every one of them has a --check mode that fails rather than silently repairing.

minify_css.py

Inlines the vendor imports, deletes rules nothing matches, points the icon fonts at their subsets

generate_read_times.py

Counts each post's words, which also decides its band in the blog filter

generate_post_facets.py

Detects which posts carry a live demo or code, for the Format filter

generate_related_posts.py

Ranks neighbours by TF-IDF over body text and bakes the cards in

generate_feed.py

Builds the RSS feed, full-text for the twenty newest posts

subset_icon_fonts.py

Cuts three icon fonts down to the glyphs the site actually uses

audit_site.py

Links, metadata, structured data, accessibility basics, feed and sitemap

generate_colophon.py

Measures everything on this page

How it is checked

Checks per push

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Run on every push and pull request

Audit baseline

0 / 0

Errors and warnings, across every page

Lines of CSS

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Lines of JavaScript

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A push runs the site audit, rebuilds the stylesheet and fails if the committed one differs, and drives every interactive post in a headless browser to check it still converges, still works at phone width, and still announces itself to a screen reader.

Type and colour

One accent does one job. Red means a control; the gradient is reserved for the two places the site signs its own name. Everything decorative is neutral, because hundreds of photographs are colour enough for one website.

The seasons

The site dresses itself for the four seasons and for the holidays below: the colours change, and each brings its own decorations, cursor and a few sounds (credited below). When a holiday falls inside a season, the holiday gets the day. Preview any of them; a preview lasts until you close the tab.

Back to today's season · Turn the seasons off

Photographs and hosting

Photography

My own, shot on a Canon EOS 60D (the older photos) and a Canon EOS R (the newer ones)

Full-size files

In a GitHub release rather than the repository, because Pages has an artifact limit and hundreds of originals do not fit inside it

Hosting

GitHub Pages, on a custom domain

The whole thing is written up, at considerably more length than this, in How This Site Is Built.

The slideshow's sounds

Other people's recordings, shared under free licences, each cut into a loop for the slideshow.

Fire

Fireplace Sound loop by PagDev (CC0)

Rain

Regen in de tent by luc de bruijn (CC BY 3.0)

Rain and thunder

Thunderstorm after hot summer day by stephan (public domain)

Forest

A dawn chorus in Shipton Gorge by Silas S. Brown (public domain)

River

Forest lawn creek by Dsw4 (public domain)

Café

Cafe ambiance by Marble Toast (CC0)

City at night

Two Lane Road in Kelowna at Midnight by Extemporalist (CC0)

The seasons' sounds

Each season puts three things on the footer, and if you turn the sounds on, most of them play a recording when clicked, also shared under free licences.

Spring

• The slideshow's rain
• Spring peepers by JohnDziak (CC0)

Summer

• Cicadas by Gatorguy76 (CC BY 3.0)
• Crickets by dklon (CC BY 3.0)
• Small waves on a rocky beach by mnalis (CC BY 3.0)

Fall

• Walking through leaves by Gravity Sound (CC BY 4.0)
• An American crow's call from the U.S. Geological Survey (public domain)
• A low flyover by five Canada geese by Extemporalist (CC0)

Winter

• Walking through snow in Berlin by Lukas Beck (CC BY 4.0)
• A black-capped chickadee in Calgary by ngoomie (CC0)
• Jump into snow by Gravity Sound (CC BY 4.0)

Burns Night

• Pipes from the United States Air Force Reserve Pipe Band (public domain)
• A toast from Work With Sounds and the Technical Museum of Slovenia (CC BY 4.0)
• The slideshow's fire

Darwin Day

• Summer's waves

World Book Day

• A page turning by planish (public domain)
• An old book shut by cori (public domain)
• A mug of tea poured by cori (public domain)

Holi

• A syringe emptied into water by ezwa (public domain), for the pichkari
• A dhol beat by Johnny Kalsi (CC BY 3.0)

May the Fourth and Revenge of the Fifth

• Artemis II lifting off, from NASA (public domain)
• Neil Armstrong's first step, from NASA (public domain)
• Saturn's radio emissions, recorded by NASA's Cassini (public domain)

International Cat Day

• Two meows by George Miquilena (CC0)
• A purring cat by Mysid (public domain)

Halloween

• Wolf howls from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain)
• A barred owl in Yellowstone recorded by the National Park Service (public domain)
• A creaky wooden casket by stephan (public domain)

Diwali

• A ghanta struck with a mallet by the_very_Real_Horst (CC0)
• Firecrackers by Almanta (CC0)
• Fireworks with a crowd by stephan (public domain)

Bonfire Night

• The slideshow's fire
• Sparklers from Work With Sounds (CC BY 4.0)
• Fireworks over Berlin by thore (public domain)

St Andrew's Day

• Oystercatchers at Loch Fleet from the British Library (CC BY 4.0)
• Burns Night's pipes

Hogmanay

• Bonfire Night's fireworks over Berlin
• A knock at the door by stephan (public domain)
• A cheer by Starlite (public domain)