A colophon is the old printers’ note at the back of a book saying how the thing was made. Here’s this site’s — partly because I enjoy reading other people’s, and partly because the architecture is an argument: it’s me eating my own cooking about what a site like this should be.
The shape
Static, with islands. The site is Astro — every page is prebuilt HTML, and JavaScript ships only where something actually moves (the tuner, the kinetic type — React, loaded per component, not per site). The animation layer is GSAP plus a smooth- scroll library; the search is Pagefind, which indexes at build time and runs entirely in your browser. No server renders anything on request, which is most of why the site is fast and all of why it’s cheap.
Markdown, no CMS. Every post is a text file in a git repository. No database, no admin login, no plugin updates — near-zero attack surface, by construction. The trade is that publishing means committing — which for a studio blog this size isn’t a trade at all; version history on every sentence is a feature blogs lost somewhere and I wanted back.
A small worker at the edge. Cloudflare serves the static files and runs one little program for the dynamic parts: the contact form (spam-checked by Turnstile, delivered by email routing) and a daily cron that sweeps a few developer communities for people who need rescue-shaped help and emails me a digest. The site also rebuilds itself every morning by scheduled action, refreshing the live figures — the drupal.org usage counters on the work pages are fetched at build time, so the proof stays current without a server to maintain.
The bill
The domain costs a normal yearly fee. The hosting — static files plus the worker, at this traffic — rounds to zero dollars a month. That’s not a stunt; it’s the honest cost of boring architecture at brochure-plus-blog scale, and it’s the same shape I recommend to clients whose sites match it.
The same architecture also shows up on a different bill: the Website Carbon Calculator rates this site A+ — cleaner than 94% of pages tested, at 0.03g of CO2 per visit (checked August 2026; the link re-runs the test live, so don’t take my word for it). Nothing here was built for that score. Static pages, small payloads, and no tracking bloat are just what respect for the visitor looks like — the carbon rating is the same decision wearing a different meter.
The look — the 1950s poster art, the broadcast-channel conceit — is custom, and the voice is flannel. The posters wear the fedora; the sentences don’t. Made in Minneapolis, maintained like I mean it.