# Colophon

The design, materials, and small decisions behind this site.

## Design

The design follows [Quiet Utility](https://alanvarghese.me/design.md): soft neutral surfaces, fine borders, small type, and room for the content. The green carries over from the previous version. Light and dark themes follow your system preference.

## Built to be static

Astro generates the public pages at build time. Reading, browsing, and navigation work without JavaScript. A little optional JavaScript waits until the page is loaded and the browser is idle; the content never depends on it.

## Writing

Posts and project writeups live in Markdown files. At build time, markdown-it renders the prose and Shiki highlights code for both themes. A private SolidJS panel and Go API edit those same files through Git.

## Type and images

Geist and Geist Mono by Vercel are self-hosted as Latin-subset variable fonts. Images are resized at build time, with responsive variants and explicit dimensions to keep loading light and layouts steady.

## More than HTML

Every regular page has plain-text, Markdown, and ANSI versions, linked in the footer. Try curl alanvarghese.me for ANSI, or request text/plain or text/markdown. An llms.txt index points to the Markdown content.

## Serving

An unprivileged nginx container serves the generated files, with compression and caching. Node is only needed during the build. The public pages have no analytics scripts, tracking pixels, or third-party font requests.

## Care in the small things

Semantic headings, keyboard focus, a skip link, and responsive layouts keep the site usable. Reduced motion and high contrast are respected, and printing switches to an ink-friendly layout. There are a few small details for curious visitors, too.

[Back to Alan Varghese](https://alanvarghese.me/)