Colophon

Before WordPress, I experimented with Cargo. I also circled around other options like Astro, static site builders like Jekyll, but each leaned more toward setup and deployments that would have taken time away from designing. Squarespace or Wix was a hard no… and after years of dismissing WordPress as unstable, I gave it a chance. Thus far, it’s been simple and iterative with an adaptable CMS, almost limitless.

Technologies & Techniques

The current site runs on a stable release of WordPress with the out-of-the-box yearly community theme. Plugins use is sparingly, and only for one-off tasks (for example, creating a child theme) before being deactivated. My aim is long-term stability without a mess of outdated add-ons.

Most of the interface is plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with PHP. The draggable desktop framework is Frankenstein-ed together over months of refining. It was written on VS Code and WebStorm, depending on which device I was using between Windows and MacOS.

Design Process

The design is content focused. My approach was most of everyone intuitively knows how a computer works, so the metaphor was familiar enough.

At the core is curiosity: my strongest trait and a focal point I wanted to emphasize in the user experience as randomized windows onload. I drove the nostalgia home with some quirky early 2000s elements from my childhood.

Writing & Workflow

Some content is backdated as it may have been published elsewhere first, but most entries come from notes, Obsidian, or long-standing drafts. I perform copy updates in the WordPress editor and are able to edit on a my phone even if it’s a pain at times. I am happy with anything as long as I can write in markdown.

Typography

Typeset is a system-UI stack:

-apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif, "Sans Serif", Icons.

It fallbacks to the next available font option, I didn’t want to choose just one. The browser picks something sensible based on the users device, and that’s good enough to me.

Philosophy

While in the early phase, I defined that this site will not be overengineer. The people I look up to have had simple, long-standing unchanged websites, some running since 2011, that still function and carry the WordPress badge.

Open source, at its core, is rooted in collectivism. In this case it’s a freedom to publish to space and back, as NASA runs on WordPress.

This site is my contribution to that tradition, even if my sites code is private, this year’s WordPress community theme is free for all.

Acknowledgments

Are.na deserves mention. It exposed me to creative tools and ideas I wouldn’t have stumbled into through my normal browsing habits. Those influences show up in this site’s design and how I will continue to interact with the world, ad infinitum.