Colophon

The stack

The public site you are reading is a fully static build - plain HTML and CSS generated byAstro, served from object storage behind a CDN. There is no client-side framework and, outside the search page, no JavaScript worth mentioning. Pages should load fast on a bad connection and work fine without scripts.

Behind the curtain sits a private CMS built onPayload with a PostgreSQL database. Everything runs serverless and scales to zero: when nothing is being written or edited, almost nothing is running. Publishing a post quietly rebuilds the whole static site within a couple of minutes. Search is prebuilt at publish time withPagefind, so it works without any search server.

Design

The design system is called Cedar & Circuitry - a Pacific Northwest palette with an engineer's grid underneath. Type is set in system fonts (nothing to download), colours are chosen to hold WCAG 2.2 AA contrast in both light and dark schemes, and animation defers to your reduced-motion preference. The timeline page draws its milestones as a cedar tree.

Privacy

There are no tracking pixels, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no third-party embeds on this site. I do keep simple, privacy-friendly analytics of my own: when a page loads, it sends back which page you viewed, which domain you arrived from (never the full link), a rough desktop/mobile/tablet guess, and - on the search page - your search terms. No IP address, no cookie, and nothing that identifies you or follows you elsewhere. It is a first-party count of what gets read, so I know which writing is worth doing more of.

The contact form stores your message and email so I can reply, plus a one-way hashed fingerprint used only to spot abuse - never your raw address on the page or my logs. If any of this changes one day, this page will say so first.

Ownership

All writing here is mine unless clearly noted. Older posts were imported from my previous WordPress blog with their original URLs preserved via redirects. You are welcome to quote with attribution; please do not republish whole pieces without asking.

Two photographs on the home page are other people's generous work: the star-trail sky is byAndrew Preble(CC0, via Unsplash), and the Rialto Beach sunset is a public-domainOlympic National Park photoby D. Archuleta.

Colophon for the curious

Astro static site · Payload CMS · PostgreSQL (Aurora Serverless, scale-to-zero) · S3 + CloudFront · AWS CDK · GitHub Actions. Built slowly, on purpose, on Vancouver Island - with AI pair programmers doing a good share of the typing and a human doing all of the deciding.