Colophon

Design

This is the 7th iteration of the blog theme Havok. It has been online since 2009, with the distinctive Star Thing logo. The design has evolved over the years, but the core principles of simplicity and minimalism have remained constant.

The design of My Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy strives to be as simple and minimal as possible, with a focus on readability and usability. The site is built with Astro and Tailwind CSS, which allows for a fast and responsive user experience.

The layout is designed to be clean and uncluttered, with a focus on the content. The site uses a single-column layout for the main content, with a sidebar for additional information. It is designed to be mobile-first, with a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.

It is seperated into 8 columns, with a 2-column sidebar and a 6-column main content area. The sidebar is used for navigation and additional information, while the main content area is used for the primary content of the site. The z-pattern is optimal for normal reading, and the sidebar is used to provide additional information without distracting from the main content.

I hope you find it pleasing.

Typography

My Vast, Right-Wing Conspiracy is set in Geist for body text and Geist Mono for code. The reading experience is the whole design, and you wouldn‘t be far off if you thought it was Helvetica.

A paper-like color palette utilizing Flexoki, which was designed for reading comfort. That is the reason the site doesn‘t have the usual system/light/dark settings you see in some Astro sites.

It uses Tailwind CSS for styling, and Expressive Code for code syntax highlighting.

Tech stack & Deployment

The site is custom built by me and Github Copilot.¹ It‘s a static site built with Astro and Tailwind CSS.

This Astro build means that I could deploy anywhere that supports static site hosting, such as Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, or Netlify.

Writing

The posts are written in Markdown and stored in a folder called writings. The frontmatter of each post contains metadata such as the title, description, and date. The posts are rendered using Astro components, which allows for a consistent look and feel across the site. Since everything is written in Markdown, it is easy to write and edit posts without needing to know HTML or CSS, and the frontmatter allows for easy organization and categorization of posts. The site also has an archive page that lists all the posts by year and month, making it easy to find older posts.

The posts are concieved in my rattled brain, then typed in the Frontmatter extension of VS Code, which is a great tool for writing Markdown. The frontmatter allows for easy organization and categorization of posts, and the Markdown syntax allows for easy formatting of text.

Since the posts are written in Markdown, I don’t have to worry about how I will move to another platform in the future. I can easily export the Markdown files and import them into another platform, such as WordPress or Ghost or whatever the next big thing is, without losing any of the content or formatting.

Footnotes

1. I use Github Copilot to help me write code faster, but I still write the code myself. It‘s a great tool for learning and improving my coding skills. ↩