Colophon

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

A two-color risograph print in pink and teal: a small desktop printing machine with a sheet of paper loaded, a floppy disk and a compact disc displayed on a shelf above it, and a cat asleep on a neat stack of paper. — The press, the retired formats, and the sysadmin.

Built with Hugo

The whole site is static, generated by Hugo . That means every page is plain HTML, poured out ahead of time - no app server waiting around, no database, no heavy framework humming in the background. The theme is hand-written: plain CSS and four small files of vanilla JavaScript, fifteen kilobytes all together, which between them filter the glossary, zoom an image, and run the search. No build step, no bundler, no package manager, nothing to install. If you View Source, you’ll mostly understand what you’re looking at. That’s on purpose.

Set in two typefaces

Fraunces does the talking - a warm, slightly old-fashioned serif with a bit of a soft jaw. JetBrains Mono handles anything that is code, or that wants to look like it: the model ids, the file paths, the occasional command you’re meant to type.

Served off a Debian box

The built files live on a small Debian server I rent, handed out by nginx , which does exactly one job: give you a file when you ask for one. That is the whole backend. There is no second act, no clever middle layer, nothing phoning home.

Search with no search engine

Type a word into search and nothing leaves your browser: no query, no service, no log of what you asked.

Every page carries a 32-character string that describes it rather than names it: 172 yes-or-no answers a model gives about what the page is about, closer to a chord than a title. Two pages about the same thing disagree in only a few of them, so what else is like this is just counting, and your browser grabs twenty kilobytes of the strings once, only if you visit search, and counts. Nobody even wrote the 172 questions: 172 Witnesses, Each One Half-Blind .

Your words never become bits, though: a plain match seeds the nearest page and the arithmetic takes over. The word is the seed. The bits are the search. It’s why “conscience” hands you an essay about a chatbot that never once uses it.

How little it actually takes

Here’s a way to feel how light a static site is. Everything you actually read here: every page of HTML, all the CSS, all four scripts - comes to about 990 KB. That’s roughly seven-tenths of one 1.44 MB floppy disk. Add every image on the whole site and it’s about 70 MB - the entire thing, every word and every picture, uses exactly one-tenth of a CD-ROM.

A caveat, because honesty is the whole point of this page: almost all of that 70 MB is pictures, and almost all of that is me being stubborn. The illustrations are lossless PNGs, kept crisp on purpose. Run the entire library through 75% JPEG - the setting nobody would ever actually notice - and every image on the site collapses to about 23 MB, the whole thing to about 24 MB, roughly a third of where it stands now. It could go on a diet tomorrow. I just like the pixels too much to make it.

So the simplest plausible computer that could serve this to the entire internet is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W , fifteen dollars, about the size of a stick of gum, sipping somewhere near a single watt. It would run Linux and nginx, hand these files to everyone who asked, and spend virtually every second of the day idle until you go viral (please let me know how to). If you wanted to be a lunatic about it, a five-dollar microcontroller with no operating system at all could do the job too. The modern web feels heavy. This corner of it refuses to be.

No cookies, no tracking

This is the part I actually care about. The site sets no cookies. It runs no analytics, no tracking pixels, no third-party anything - no Google watching over my shoulder, no “we value your privacy” banner, because there’s nothing to consent to. The web server keeps the same plain access logs servers have kept since about 1995, and that is where it ends. Nothing here is built to follow you around the internet, build a little dossier, or work out who you are.

Here’s the trade I’d make, and I mean it: I’d rather have one person email me to say they finally understood something here - or to ask a question sharp enough that they’d clearly thought about it before asking - than watch a real-time map fill up with a thousand strangers worldwide I’ll never hear a single word from.

One thoughtful reader beats a global heat-map of anonymous dots.

You came to read. You can just read.

A cyanotype blueprint: an exploded technical diagram of a small print shop's every part, shelves and presses and type drawers annotated, with a small fluffy shih tzu asleep in the lower corner among the callouts. — The complete infrastructure, drawn to scale. Staff pictured at rest.