colophon.

colophon: A fancy way of saying ‘how I built this site’.

background

I rebuilt this site from scratch in June 2026. My previous personal sites all revolved around some or other Vite setup with the last being React.

This version of the site is the first where I’ve actively thought about, amongst other things, integrating my own writing, making it more than a stripped down digital CV that my previous sites were. Together with that I’m giving the “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere” aka POSSE approach a go.

tech

This website is built with Astro in VS Code. I wanted a framework this time around so that I didn’t have to build and manage everything from scratch.

The site’s code lives in GitHub and is hosted on a Cloudflare Worker. It’s mainly there as that’s where all my other code lived, but I’m considering moving it elsewhere at some point - but currently the convenience of automated builds and connection to Cloudflare keeps me there for now. Why Cloudflare Workers? I already manage my DNS of other domains there so it was a natural starting point and in the past I’ve used their Pages product without an issue. In my research it also seemed to be one of the best options for static site hosting with the benefit of serverless functions if I need them.

Currently all styling is applied with vanilla CSS.

This site also got a shiny new domain. I get all my domains from Porkbun and, as already mentioned, manage them with Cloudflare DNS. AFAIR I originally found PorkBun because they were the cheapest, or perhaps had a TLD that others didn’t, but I’ve never had an issue with them and love their sense of humour.

My email is hosted with Mailbox Mail who I use for other domanins’ email and who I chose a while back for their privacy and security features. They were one of the only ones back then that were privacy conscious, affordable, and supported custom domains.

Analytics are captured with Umami - not to sell your data, but to understand if anyone at all reads this and if anything in particular seems to ‘stick’. I chose them for their generous free tier and because they also have privacy in mind - they’re open source, don’t use cookies, don’t track across sites, or collect personal data, and they’re GDPR compliant out of the box.

If you have any other questions - send me an email.