colophon

Every serious website of this era ends with a colophon, the page where the author explains the fonts at greater length than the content. Tradition is tradition.

typography

Body text is set in Georgia, Matthew Carter's gift to the screen — free with the operating system and better than most things that aren't. Anything that whispers (dates, navigation, fine print) is Verdana at 10 pixels, the official typeface of metadata. Code is Monaco, or whatever your machine insists on calling a monospace.

technology

Hand-coded XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS, written in TextMate on a PowerBook G4, more or less. (Technically it is compiled by a static-site generator from the future, named after a space program. But the spirit is TextMate, and the spirit is what validates.) The layout uses floats, which took three days, which is the normal amount.

No tables were used in this layout. The previous design was made entirely of tables — also a starfield, a MIDI jukebox, and a guestbook with a broken Perl script — and the one before that had a particle system and a dark mode. The git history remembers everything; time is a flat circle with good version control.

syndication

The site offers full-text RSS 2.0, because making people visit your website to read your website is a 2026 idea, and we don't do those here. Subscribe in NetNewsWire, Bloglines, or whatever the kids use.

statistics

Traffic is lovingly tracked by Mint, in the sense that I think about installing Mint most weekends. Technorati rank: 1,482,997 and climbing. The hit counter from the previous design reached 013,539 before it was retired with full honors; its digits live on in the archives.

validation

This site aspires to validate. The doctype says HTML5 because the compiler insists; the heart says XHTML 1.0 Strict; the W3C says nothing, because the W3C has seen worse. We call the whole arrangement "standards-compliant in spirit," and the footer badge agrees.

license

Words and code are Creative Commons BY-SA — some rights reserved, which in 2005 was a small revolution you could put in your footer.