Colophon

Typographical

This website uses a few different fonts:

One is Filosofia, designed in 1996 by Zuzana Licko and published by Emigre. I’m a huge fan of Licko’s designs; they feel to me like avatars of an age. I also love the fact that Emigre funded its iconic magazine with the sale of digital fonts: one of the all-time great cross-subsidies.

Another is Trade Gothic Next, a 2008 revision by Akira Kobayashi and Tom Grace of Jackson Burke’s 1947 design. I love fonts of this style, called “grotesque”. It was years ago that I learned the Star Wars opening crawl is set in, of all things, News Gothic; that’s what cracked them open for me.

For headlines, I’m currently audi­tioning Stephen Nixon’s wild AT Kyrios: “a curious, slightly psyche­delic black­letter family”!

Fiction is, when appropriate, presented in my Perfect Edition template, which uses Vollkorn, the “free and healthy typeface for bread and butter use” designed by Friedrich Althausen and provided as a profound public good.

Technical

This website is managed using Middleman, a static site generator that’s simple and flexible and, most importantly, written in Ruby, which is the program­ming language I know best. My instal­la­tion of Middleman is hot-rodded with all sorts of conve­niences and customizations, including many typo­graph­ical tune-ups.

A few scraps of support code run as Google Cloud Functions, all of them written in Ruby and Google’s Functions Framework, a real pleasure to use.

I send emails using Mailchimp, which I operate through its API, chore­o­graphing messages with a Ruby script that I run on my laptop.

You might have picked up on the fact that I like Ruby; in fact, it is the great love of my program­ming life. Its creator, Yukihiro Matsumoto, once expressed Ruby’s philos­ophy like this:

For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Program­mers often feel joy when they can concen­trate on the creative side of program­ming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.

Style guide

I’m noting a few sitewide pref­er­ences here, mostly for myself:

• Titles of books, periodicals, movies, etc. in plain text rather than italics.

• When a sentence ends in an ital­i­cized phrase followed by extrav­a­gant punctuation, italicize the punctuation, too!

• Email, but e-book. Website, but on second reference, site, sometimes. Web page, strangely. Mini-site. Data center. Home page. Home screen. Signup form, but sign up: you sign up with the signup form.

• Multibook project, not multi-book.

• Reread, rewatch, redownload.

• Robo-taxi, I think.

• Coworker, not co-worker.

• Side by side, not side-by-side. Likewise, book by book. Day to day. A theme emerges.

• A couple things, not a couple of things. I think I changed my mind about this one.

• Codename, not code name.

• Penumbraverse, not Penumbra-verse.

• Tiptoeing, not tip-toeing.

• Punctuation goes inside the quotation marks for complete, stand­alone sentences; otherwise it goes outside, in the UK style.

• Phrases following a colon are almost never capitalized. Yes, even full sentences: who’s the boss here, anyway?

• Hony soyt qui mal pence, the Gawain spelling.

• Bestseller and bestselling, although of course it is the New York Times Best Sellers list — note Sellers, rather than Seller.

And finally, I’ll repeat a useful maxim:

August 2024, Oakland