Colophon

How this site is made, with what, and why — in the old tradition of printers signing their work.

The short story

This site lived on Squarespace from 2015 to 2026. When the renewal notice hit 180€ a year, I sat down with an AI coding agent and rebuilt the whole thing in a few hours — the long version is in Farewell, Squarespace!. Since then I edit the site by telling the agent what I want. I have yet to look at the code.

Stack

• Static site — every page is pre-built HTML. No app server, no database, no client-side rendering.
• Content is plain markdown — book reviews, blog notes (English and German), and yearly reviews are files in folders. Publishing is a git push.
• Hosted on Cloudflare Pages, source on GitHub. Deploys run automatically in about two minutes.
• JavaScript budget: one file — a tiny first-party script that remembers your light/dark choice. Everything else, including the animations and the compass on the 404 page, is pure CSS.

Typography & design

• Headings are set in Young Serif, body text in Bitter — both self-hosted (no requests to Google).
• Warm cream and muted teal by day; a slate-dark palette by night. Covers on blog posts swap to theme-matching variants.
• The design carries over the spirit of the old Squarespace site — same warmth, fewer megabytes.

Principles

• No cookies, no trackers, no third-party requests. Analytics are aggregate-only, measured at the edge without a script. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
• Fast by default — self-hosted fonts, compressed images, aggressive caching, static HTML.
• Own your words — everything here lives in files I control, exportable in seconds, with feeds instead of algorithms.

Running costs

Hosting: free. Domain: ~$10 a year. That's the whole bill — down from 180€ a year on the old setup.

Built July 2026 with Claude Code. Icons from Lucide (vendored). See also: /follow · /tip · /now · /uses