Colophon
When you’re building something, you know all of the trade-offs.
A colophon is traditionally an inscription placed usually at the end of a book, giving facts about its publication. In web nerd circles, it is a fancy way of saying “here’s how I made this website”. So, here’s how I made this website.
This website is a loose collection of ideas (in both word and code) sort of held together with epistemic glue gone crusty and loose around the edges. For a fascinating take on epistemic glue as the results of “…jointly satisfying epistemic needs – making sense of the world together…” see M. Rossignac-Milon, E.T. Higgins, Epistemic Companions: Shared Reality Development in Close Relationships, COPSYC (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.01.001 (emphasis in the original)
Technology
Almost everything on this website begins as a notation in Zotero. It’s really hard to overstate how much of my life is contained inside one piece of software. Speaking of which, everything that isn’t in Zotero is in Obsidian, which is also where I do almost all of my writing, for this and other projects. Content for this website is written in Markdown in Obsidian, and then massaged through a series of export scripts to render into the Liquid template tags that allow Jekyll to do its thing.
Jekyll is a static site generator that does all the server side stuff. I feed it a pile of Markdown files and it spits out a website according to the templates I provide it. Speaking of templates, I began this website with a copy of the Tufte Jekyll theme and then began bashing on it with wild abandon. By the time I had gotten to publishing the first draft of the site, all that was really left was the red contrast color, the hacked up logo that matched my initials, and a copy of Tufte CSS. As a huge fan of Edward Tufte, I of course made every effort to follow his design edicts.
Typography
Speaking of Edward Tufte and design, this website is set in ET Book, an evolution from the ET Bembo font Tufte and Dmitry Krasny designed as a computer replacement for the Monotype Bembo lead font Tufte used in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983). As Tufte does, I use Gill Sans, also from Monotype, when a sans serif font is needed.
Accessibility
I endeavor to make this website as accessible as possible. Specifically I have tried my best to adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. That document outlines how to make web content accessible for people with disabilities and user-friendly for everyone.
For testing purposes, I use the QualWeb test suite developed by the Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, the IBM Equal Access Accessibility Checker and the Sa11y bookmarklet from Toronto Metropolitan University.
Colors
The color palette in use here has been chosen to provide a consistent visual effect regardless of colorblindness. For this I am indebted to David Nichols for his excellent Coloring for Colorblindness website, Toptal for their genius Colorblind Web Page Filter, and Bang Wong, for his article in Nature Methods on guidelines to make graphics accessible to those with color vision deficiencies.
Tagging
There are a few tags that I use that are worth knowing about. In addition to subject tagging, I mark up every(?) page here with the following tags:
Status
This is a less metaphorical version of what Maggie Appleton calls growth stages for her writing. Possible Values:
- Status: stub
- Status: In Progress
- Status: Finished(?)
Audience
I use this to tag who the intended or assumed audience is for the post. Think of this as an anti-trigger-warning. Very freeform, but with some emergent structure.
Examples:
- Audience: militant anti-fascists
- Audience: web-design nerds
- Audience: diy enthusiasts
An adaptation of the Epistemic Statuses I first encountered via Devon Seugel, adapted to my own style. See this discussion on LessWrong for a lot of interesting takes on how NOT to do epistemic statuses.
Confidence
This is a measure of my ability to write authoritatively on this subject, as measured by me, of course. Possible Values:
- Amateur: I know nothing, please correct me
- Aficionado: I’m pretty sure I understand, point me towards the deep end
- Expert: I do this for a living, let’s compare sources