colophon
credits
My site's framework is based off of speakthesky's now-archived Zonelots, a fork of Marina Kittaka's Zonelets. I've also made use of a patch by strflr for a Zonelets bug that made its way into Zonelots. I've made some pretty major edits, but the logic and basic structure of the code remains the same.
The theme switcher is based off this tutorial by Studytonight, with the stacking effect based off this snippet by Stephanie Eckles.
My guestbook code comes from Virtual Observer's comment widget. The moderation edits, not to mention the brilliant idea of calling this sort of page a colophon, came from Frills.
The syntactical styling for code blocks (e.g. here) is done with Prism.js 1.29.0, with a theme I customized. Charts (e.g. here) are done with Chart.js 4.4.4, lightly modified. (FTR, though I didn't write these scripts, both are hosted on my site.)
Tooltips are pure HTML/CSS, made with the help of this tutorial by ReplayBird. Custom checkboxes (and God only knows what else) made with the help of W3Schools.
This month's mystery theme uses these cute skull patterns by Ja Polina.
A note on permissions
The things noted above are made by people who are not me, and you'll have to go to them for permissions (though all are free, most have no stipulations, and the ones that do only require extremely reasonable things like "don't remove the credit statement from my code").
In terms of other code on the site, everything is mine. Use whatever you want, however you want. I like being credited (especially if you tell me about it—I love to hear that people are making use of the things I share!) but it's a nice bonus, not a requirement.
When it comes to text and graphics, I'm a little more restrictive, in that I'd like to be credited if you reproduce any text and I would ask that you not use any graphics (with the obvious exception of my button, because of, like, how buttons work).
But code? Do whatever. If you want to use browser tools to inspect my code and lift a bit you like, go for it. If you want to see my styles or scripts and you don't know how to find them yourself, reach out by email; I'm happy to share. You can also reach out if you'd like clarification on why/how I've done what I've done. I've made tutorials and write-ups on the things that I find interesting, but there's nothing that I haven't shared because I want it to be a secret or off-limits somehow.
Look. I'm a classicist. I have some proper training in Python for digital humanities purposes, and I took a class in Java in high school, but I've never had any formal traning in web design or any of the relevant languages. My site would not exist without the generosity of countless others, who have shared their expertise and time on the internet for free in the interest of helping others in their community. I can't imagine making use of that tradition as I have and not sharing the products in the same spirit.
design
I have four themes and you can switch between them using the buttons on the left side of the screen (at the bottom of your screen on desktop, at the top of the page on mobile). There's a light theme, a dark theme, and a high-contrast theme (which also has a larger font size), plus a mystery theme that changes whenever I feel like it. If you have your browser set to prefer a dark theme or a high contrast theme, that should show up by default.
The body font is Nunito, which I chose because I like it a lot. The header font is Montserrat, which I chose because I think the sharp edges contrast nicely with the more rounded edges of Nunito. Ancient Greek characters[1] in body text are rendered in a font called M PLUS Rounded 1c, which seems to be mainly designed for Japanese (?) but matches Nunito reasonably well and for some unfathomable reason supports polytonic Greek.
The background, favicon, and front page banner are my bee. I made my bee. I am very proud of my bee.
The page I use to test out styles when I'm messing around with the CSS is here, if you're interested; the samples for my various mimicked media are here.
uses
I work on a Mac laptop running macOS Sonoma.
| use | using | note | $ |
|---|---|---|---|
| browser | Firefox | Firefox all the way, baby. The enhanced tracking protection plus ad blocking by UBlock Origin has made a truly astounding difference in my experience of the internet. I do still keep a Chromium-based browser (Brave) on my computer because the accessibility features in the developer tools are better, so I break it out once in a blue moon when I'm changing my color scheme to make sure everything checks out. | $0 |
| code editor | VS Code | I used Brackets for about five years until Adobe ended support for it, at which point I switched to VS Code.[2] I use this Live Server extension and the Ayu Legacy Light theme, plus Microsoft's Python extensions. | $0 |
| code font | Fira Code | This is the font I use in my code editor and for code on this site. I like the lowercase g (g), the ampersand (&), and the fact that zeroes are clearly distinguished from capital Os (0 vs O). I used this fun site to help me pick a font. |
$0 |
| color schemes | Coolors | I've been using this site for years and years—I think since high school? The number of ads and popups are highly annoying,[3] but I keep coming back anyway because the functionality is just so good. | $0+ |
| domain registrar | Name Cheap | Does what I need it to do for just under $6 a year. I found this through Kalechips' credits. | $6+ |
| search engine | DuckDuckGo | I'll be honest: I tried DuckDuckGo a few years ago when I stopped using Chrome and I found it enough worse than Google to be simply frustrating. I was pleasantly surprised when I gave it another try a few months ago and found that it felt less like a downgrade and more like a return to what Google was at its best. | $0 |
| web host | Netlify | The free plan is more than sufficient: for context, I'm halfway through the current period (as of April 22, 2024) and I've used less than half a percent of my allotted bandwidth and less than one percent of my allotted build time for the month. I found this on Kalechips' list of webhosts. | $0+ |
- Tl;dr: ancient Greek uses pretty much the same alphabet as modern Greek but with extra diacritical marks (which very few fonts support).^
- I do know about the resurrected version of Brackets, but at this point I've gotten too used to being able to run code from the terminal in my code editor.^
- Much less so since I got an ad blocker. God bless UBlock Origin.^