Colophon
A living log of building this site.In books, a colophon lists how it was made. Most website colophons are static "built with" pages. This one's different—a stream of build decisions, debugging sessions, and lessons learned as I work on the site.
March 2026
Astro 6 beta + Workers migration, production cutover, tweet embeds, and perf cleanup.
Link preview tooltips now prefetch metadata before you hover, eliminating the visible flash between domain fallback and rich preview. Uses ForesightJS proximity detection to prefetch on cursor approach.
Link preview tooltips now verify that the URL being previewed actually appears on the referring page, and preview images render through proper DOM construction instead of string injection.
Upgraded beautiful-mermaid to 1.1.3, fixed XY chart bar rounding, made the diagram modal edge-to-edge, and unified drag handle indicators across code panel and modal.
Added build-time llms.txt generation, a shared metadata resolver for consistent page titles and descriptions, reusable JSON-LD schema components, and a validation script that checks SEO health across the built sitemap.
The site felt chonky. Traced it from view transition jank on mobile through modal lag and same-page nav bugs to the real culprit: the critical CSS integration was async-loading stylesheets, causing massive layout shift on every page load.
Swapped every cover image on the site from Recraft v3 to v4. Same palette, same style prompt, better compositions. The prompt generation pipeline got an overhaul too.
Discovered web-haptics, a zero-dep wrapper around the Vibration API (with a clever iOS fallback). A handful of prompts later, every interactive element on the site has tactile feedback on mobile.
February 2026
Misconfigured critters was inlining everything. Went looking for alternatives, found archived projects and dated advice, ended up building a Playwright-based critical CSS integration from scratch.
Flipped one toggle and now every page on this site speaks Markdown to agents.
I wanted to see what I'm actually shipping, not just that I'm shipping. Built a GitHub activity dashboard backed by live GitHub API data at the edge, with two very different chart implementations.
Hovering external links now shows a preview tooltip with favicon, title, and description. A Cloudflare Worker fetches and caches metadata, while the client uses a singleton tooltip and Floating UI for positioning.
The 'Calling the Plumbers' post has an optional background animation, a recreation of the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver. Canvas 2D with simplified 3D projection. Hit play on the control strip to start it up, or go fullscreen for the screensaver experience.
Standard X embeds load tracking scripts and set cookies on every page view. This site uses astro-tweet to fetch posts at build time and render them as static HTML. X never knows when someone views the embedded post.
January 2026
Spent hours convinced my images weren't caching across View Transitions navigations. Server headers were perfect. Cloudflare config was perfect. The problem was DevTools "Disable cache" being checked.
Added build-time mermaid diagrams using beautiful-mermaid. SVG output, themeable via CSS variables, zero client-side JavaScript.