The publishing term colophon is a statement in a book containing information about the publication of the book. In the early days of personal webpages, when most sites were custom built or assembled from the parts bin, the term was adopted for the “how I made this” section of someone’s site. And so that tradition continues here.
Content
The motivations for the latest version of this site were twofold. 1) I wanted a public notebook 2) I wanted a medium to present my photography.
I’ve been an appreciator of a personal digital notebook for the better part of a decade, doing most of my work in folders of Markdown files. Tools like Obsidian and Roam Research reinforced and expanded that working pattern. At this point I do the majority of my personal digital work within Obsidian.
I wanted to have a public notebook as well, sharing in-progress work and growing it over time, which I see the notes section of this site growing into. Inspiration for this came from many places, with Andy Matuschak’s notes and Maggie Appleton’s digital garden being some of the biggest influences.
The idea for presenting photography started a few months ago. Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to do a photography mentorship with Jakob Lilja-Ruiz (aka portra papi). One of those weeks was dedicated to curating your work, a skill he felt was among the most underrated in photography.
Curation is something I’ve never put much thought to. I cull the bad photos, but hadn’t considered how to arrange the good. I tried to develop the practice over 2024 as I curated series to post on Instagram, but I struggled with it. I wasn’t finding imaginative choices, and was mostly coming up with collections of similar things like silhouettes or certain landscapes. I found myself wanting a different format in which to think about curation.
Many of the highlights of my year, both experientially and photographically, are the roadtrips I take exploring the Western US. Documenting these travels has been the focus of my photography for several years. Taking inspiration from Bound for Nowhere and Adventure Taco, I realized the curation I was most interested in was documenting those travels in both prose and visual. This could be a thread to explore my photo collection more deeply. My hope is over time the travel chronologies serve as an entry point to other forms of curation.
Build
The site is built using the Astro framework. I’m not really qualified to weigh its pros and cons. My go-to guy for everything frontend, Sam Breed, uses it for his site and that’s good enough reason for me. While I’m not versed in frontend frameworks, it does seem sensibly put together and packages a number of ideas I’m vaguely aware of being good things.
Astro components have allowed me to build the site out of self-contained chunks that serve one purpose, and reuse them across both the HTML and Markdown portions of the site. And Astro’s separation of site content from the framework is another huge selling point. The majority of the site content is Markdown files, which free me from having to create them in my coding editor.
The end result is I’m able to write this page in Obsidian, which is much more amenable to writing prose than VS Code, while at the same time being able to easily introduce fairly complex modifications to the layout/style when I want to.
Styling
The site style is borrowed from tufte-css. I’ve been a fan of the layout and typography of his books since I first encountered them. The aesthetic feels like modernization of classic academic texts like Principia Mathematica and On the Origin of Species, and having a style that more closely resembles a printed page than a chromed website appeals to me.
I’m a huge proponent of Tufte’s sidenotes in particular. I think parenthetically and often want to say something about Wooooo sidenotes or related to the thing I’m actually saying. Sidenotes accomplish this in a way much more elegant than footnotes, which hardly work on printed pages and not at all on lengthy webpages.