What is a Colophon?
Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it was either.
Tools and Technology
Quartz
This site is built using quartz, an excellent Typescript based static site generator built with Obsidian users in mind. I’ve got very little Typescript experience, at least at the time of writing this blog, but there is very little I need to think about as quartz has everything I’d really want out of the box.
I’ve been a fan of Quartz since it was built on top of Hugo, and even had a rather short lived iteration of this blog in that version before I hopped onto something else for awhile, which even then was less due to Quartz and more due with me having shiny object syndrome.
Obsidian
I do all of the writing for this site in Obsidian. When I’m not doing anything that requires updating the site infrastructure itself, I never really have to leave Obsidian, which is excellent for my use case.
GitHub Pages
I’ve used GitHub Pages for every iteration of this blog, and that’s no different here. Its gnarly to me that you can just host whole sites for free on services like that. Nothing special here, I copied the setup instructions on the Quartz site.
Giscus
The ability to have a comments section on any of the pages using giscus is another thing that Quartz provides out of box. See the setup instructions here.
Principals
This isn’t a money making venture
I don’t want this site to become a product and therefore subservient to the incentives that come with being one. Therefore:
- There will never be any type of paid advertisements on this site
- At the very most, there might be affiliate links available to purchase things that I’m recommending
- Even in those cases it will be clearly marked and I’ll try to remember to provide a non-affiliate option.
- Any recommendations you see on this site are because I think they are good products, and never to put money in my pocket
- I’m never going to put anything on this site behind a paywall
- I have a way to send tips over on Coffee if you really want to show me support, but you won’t see me trying to drive traffic over there
This isn’t a clout making venture
I don’t have any desire to become internet famous from this site, so you won’t see any of the strategies that are often employed to build a fan base:
- I’m not going to have clickbait titles
- If I do put analytics on the site, it will be something like Plausible to respect the privacy of the user
- I’m not going to follow a strict publishing schedule required to build a following
- I’ll never have a newsletter for you to sign up for