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.

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 a single small file of vanilla JavaScript (it filters the glossary; that’s its entire career). 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.

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, the lone script - comes to about 450 KB. That’s roughly a third of one 1.44 MB floppy disk. Add every image on the whole site and it’s about 12 MB - comfortably less than the RAM in a 1998 desktop, which by then was already shipping with 32 to 128 MB.

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.