Colophon

This site is a static blog. There is no database, no server, and no build step you have to remember to run by hand — pushing to master is the whole deploy.

The stack

Astro in static output mode, deployed to GitHub Pages. Posts are Markdown files in src/content/blog/; their frontmatter is validated against a schema at build time, so a missing title or a malformed date fails the build instead of shipping a broken page.

• Routing — file-based, with posts under /writing/<slug>/.
• Feed — an RSS endpoint generated from the same content collection as the pages.
• Sitemap — emitted by @astrojs/sitemap.
• Zero client-side JavaScript beyond Astro’s optional prefetch on link hover.

The design system

The palette is warm paper (#f6f4f0) with warm charcoal (#151412) for dark mode, and exactly one accent — the same brand red used elsewhere, kept for hairlines, underlines and small marks. No gradients, no glows, no coloured headings. Type is set in system font stacks, which means no webfont requests and no flash of unstyled text. Serif italics appear only as decks and pull quotes, as a counterweight to the sans headings.

One detail worth explaining

Because this is a GitHub Pages project site, everything is served from /blog/. Astro applies that base to routes it generates itself, but not to strings you write by hand — so a plain href="/about" silently points at the wrong place in production. Every internal link therefore goes through a single helper:

const BASE = import.meta.env.BASE_URL.replace(/\/+$/, '');

export function href(path = '/'): string {
	const absolute = path.startsWith('/') ? path : `/${path}`;
	return `${BASE}${absolute}` || '/';
}

That is a small function, but it is the difference between a site where the navigation works and one where it quietly 404s.

What is deliberately missing

No analytics, no tracking scripts, no cookie banner, no comment system, no newsletter modal. If you want to follow along, the RSS feed is there.