Colophon
This website takes seriously that the World Wide Web was not designed to be a network of applications but a network of documents. As a result, the primary activity that visitors will engage in is reading.
Nevertheless, it also takes seriously the prospect that the internet might be beautiful. Rather than relying on an image, the index page’s hero was written entirely in CSS. The internet provides something that traditional print media doesn’t: interactivity. As a result, the website’s theme changes throughout the course of each day. There are six different themes, each corresponding to the time of day.
This website is responsive: it should be as pleasant to read on mobile as it is on desktop. Items that are organized horizontally on desktop become vertical on mobile.
This website is also accessible. All elements of the website include ARIA attributes, ensuring that they’re readable on screen readers and other devices.
Compliance
This website is compliant with the following web standards:
Inspiration
The design of the website was inspired by the artwork of Giorgio di Chirico, an early 20th century Italian painter who acted–in many ways–as a forerunner to the surrealists. He called his artwork pittura metafisica: metaphysical painting. He was heavily influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, and his paintings depicted northern Italian cities while juxtaposing the classical past with industrial modernity. His paintings can best be recognized through long shadows; bright, warm sun-baked colors; and hollow emptiness. When looking at one of his paintings, it’s all but impossible to shrug off the confrontation with the uncanny.
The hero scene on the home page is explicitly based on his work, and the colors found throughout are inspired by him. His paintings were at their finest when depicting afternoons and late evenings: if you’d like to see it here, stop by between 2:00 pm and 9:00 pm. That’s di Chirico at his best.
In honor of his work, I’ve named the theme of the website “metafisica.”
Rather than frame this website as a “garden”–as Maggie Appleton and many others have, I continued with a metaphor that I think di Chirico would have been satisfied with: architecture. Di Chirico died in Rome, after having moved there at 60 years old. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Neither were the ideas put out on this website. They emerged over periods of long deliberation, discussion, reading, and–quite often–incubation.
Built With
This site is written in HTML with CSS and delivered using Hugo.
I had initially played with WordPress. I began hosting my own website in July 2024 with a WordPress build. I called it D-Integration, and wrote short, punchy blog posts on it. At that point, I felt skittish about publishing my writing and–when analytics began to show that it was receiving more than 100 hits from different parts of the world–I pulled it. I brought it back, redesigned, in early 2025, but quickly took it down again. By summer 2025, I had begun to think more closely about what this internet might be able to do. I was unhappy with the rapid pace I felt I needed to pursue when “blogging,” and anything I read about “blogging” dealt with SEO and sales. I wanted something more personal.
In my first draft of this site, I built SEO into the website, I created share links to Facebook, I ensured that Google crawled the site and maintained solid analytics. I even posted my blog posts to subreddits, Facebook groups, and more. But this was exhausting, and it missed the point. Why is all of this necessary? I’m not trying to sell something. The reason I created a website, in the first place, was to write and think beyond social media.
I spent time actively seeking out personal websites, and–at first–I found them alarmingly difficult to find. This was strange: my early experiences of the internet had been defined by them. When I did find websites for people, they were most often portfolios, which is not what I wanted my site to be. Eventually, I came across the IndieWeb and small web, as well as spaces like 32bit Cafe. In these spaces, the classic website builders–WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and so on–were the exception, not the norm. My favorite websites were built with something else entirely: Static Site Generators (SSGs). There are a handful of good ones: Eleventy, Jekyll, Astro, and Hugo. They’re highly customizable, and you can do all sorts of things in them, including “blog,” if you so choose.
Hugo best met my specifications: it was fast, it was flexible, and it allowed me to play directly with the HTML and CSS. The templating syntax was fairly intuitive to me. At first, I played with different Hugo themes, but I found them a bit boring, so I decided to build my own from scratch. Hugo made this easy. Because all content-writing takes place in markdown files, I can write quickly and easily. I get to own all of my content without it being wrapped in layers of SQL databases and PHP syntax. My site is unlikely to break due to unexpected updates, and there is very little surface area that may pose a security risk.
My website is hosted on Hostinger, which I find provides everything I need and has very little downtime.
I’ve connected my website to Obsidian, where I do my writing and editing. I use YAML frontmatter, which appears cleanly in Obsidian, for things like titles, descriptions, and metadata. Then, when I finish changing something, I use a hotkey that I defined (CTRL+ALT+P) to publish updates, prompting me for a git commit message, and pushing a build of the website through Hugo. The public/ folder–the built output of the site–can be seen on GitHub. The publish pipeline also updates my files in Hostinger, meaning that changes are immediate. I’ve also added a hook to update the changelog with commit messages, making my changes publicly viewable.
For a comprehensive overview of this website’s elements, check out the style guide.
The website is set in Jost and relies on Piazzolla for headings. The fact that the heading font is called “Piazzolla” and the site has a piazza is coincidental.