Colophon
A few notes on how this site is put together, for anyone who's curious about that sort of thing. I usually am.
The stack
The whole thing is a static site built with Astro, styled with Tailwind, and served from Cloudflare Pages. There's no database and no CMS behind it. Every page is plain HTML by the time it reaches you, which is why it loads the way it does. When I want to change something, I edit the source and rebuild. Simple on purpose.
The type
Headings and the bits of chrome are set in DM Sans; the body and most of the italics are Lora. Both are self-hosted as variable fonts straight from the site, not pulled off a font CDN, so nothing about what you read here gets handed to a third party. The accent color, that muted oxblood, is the only real splash of color in the place, and I keep it that way deliberately.
The photographs
The photos in the gallery are mine. Before any of them go up they get resized down to around 2400 pixels and run through a step that strips the EXIF metadata, which is the hidden data a camera bakes into every file. That data can include things like GPS coordinates, and I'd rather not publish the exact spot I was standing for a photo, so it comes out. The camera and lens you see in the captions are typed in by hand, not read back off the file. Privacy by design, basically.
Who built it
I built this with a team of AI collaborators I call the Coglins, and I'm happy to say so out loud. I'm not interested in pretending a human did every keystroke when that isn't true, and I'm not interested in handing the whole thing over and calling it mine either. The design, the writing, the decisions about what this site is and isn't, those are me. The Coglins help me build faster and catch the things I'd miss on my own. If you want my longer thinking on working this way without losing your own voice in the process, that's most of what I write about over on Substack.