Colophon
How this site is put together
I’ve long had a blog Logical Disconnect and as a matter of course I had a personal site for my domain mcallister.ws but it was never anything more than one or two pages with no coherent design and not a lot of thought about what it could be. I spent a lot of time looking at sites I thought matched my goal for this site.
- Julia Evans (jvns.ca)
- Dan Luu (danluu.com)
- Matt Mullenweg — About (ma.tt/about)
- Paul Stamatiou (paulstamatiou.com)
- MacSparky — About (macsparky.com/about)
- Patrick McKenzie (kalzumeus.com)
- Bartosz Ciechanowski (ciechanow.ski)
- Brandur Leach (brandur.org)
- Simon Willison (simonwillison.net)
- Josh W. Comeau (joshwcomeau.com)
- Maggie Appleton (maggieappleton.com)
- Derek Sivers (sive.rs)
- Craig Mod (craigmod.com)
And then did a bunch of iterating in Claude Design to come up with a design system.
Type
- Source Sans 3 Headings and all running copy, at 19px. Everything I see from AI is Inter so I didn’t want that.
- Source Serif 4 Blockquotes it’s the same family.
- IBM Plex Mono Code, dates, badges, status. I’m techy I need a mono.
Build
- Generator
gonzo. I lovegolangfor the speed and similarity to C and I just love how easy it is to make really fast code in Go and I wanted the generator to just make the whole site in < 1s if possible. Also I like writing in Markdown. There are existing tools but one of the benefits of being able to quickly write pieces of code with agents is to just overly customize whatever you want. And the speed let me have a serve feature so I can have it run live and let me edit the files and see it recompile on the fly. Oh and calling it Gonzo was because I love the Muppets and it’s in Go so I named the commandnzo. Gonzo is a bit weird and an acquired taste and can end up causing some chaos and seemed the perfect spirit animal for the website project. - Deploy I can push from my computer to Cloudflare and basically run the whole thing for free. Or I can just push to
mainon a repo after editing things and have an action that can post. - Posting from the road I’ve been really ramping up my home tooling running on a Raspberry Pi and taking advantage of things like Cloudflare tunnel and/or Tailscale so I can host a little Go webapp for letting me post, and do all the extra work like cleaning up images. And this can provide an API for future iOS apps. And before I get that far I could make a simple Shortcut that helps me post images to my Postcard category. Oh the API/Webapp is named
scooter. - Pages Static HTML, generated at build time. No client-side framework; the only JavaScript is the theme switcher, the mobile menu. Some more may come into play if I needed but I just want it to be as simple as possible.
- Styling One stylesheet of design tokens and one of components, shared by both sites. Breakpoints are container queries.
- Fonts Self-hosted woff2. Nothing is requested from a third party unless I screw up the Cloudflare settings.
- Analytics None. No cookies, no tracking. At least not on purpose.
I might eventually make that software that creates this publicly open source but I don’t know how useful it is generically the more I work on it the more it’s tweaked to my specific preferences and not generic. Again with Agentic coding I think everyone who has any coding interest should just do this. My Agentic coding IDE is a custom set of tooling in Emacs. Like a gentleman.
Feeds
- Everything on the blog logicaldisconnect.org/feed.xml Articles, notes, postcards and build logs.
- This site mcallister.ws/changes.xml Only when a page here meaningfully changes, which is rarely. The same list is a page too. The full feed menu is on the blog.
I’ll also have specific posts out to my GoToSocial site/account @mcl@zarus.me