Design

The design of Locus strives to be as simple and minimal as possible, with an uncompromising focus on readability, whitespace, and usability.

Rather than chasing web design trends or stuffing the viewport with widgets, Locus uses a clean, responsive layout bounded by a 60rem maximum width:

  • Desktop: A two-column CSS grid with a fixed 14rem sidebar on the left for navigation and search, leaving the rest of the canvas for the main reading area.
  • Mobile: Collapses seamlessly to a single column under 40rem, keeping the writing front-and-center while tucking navigation neatly below.
  • Mark: Anchored at the top by the capital Greek letter Lambda (Λ) logo.

I hope you find it pleasing to read.

Typography & Styling

Locus is set in Geist for body text and Geist Mono for code, metadata, and tabular figures, self-hosted locally as WOFF2. Designed by Vercel, Geist delivers a crisp, neo-grotesque reading experience optimized for screen legibility. You might even see some Geist Pixel if you're lucky.

The styling is 100% handcrafted Vanilla CSS—no Tailwind CSS, no utility bloat, and no client-side CSS runtimes. The visual aesthetic relies on a clean, paper-inspired palette defined with native CSS custom properties: crisp white (#ffffff), dark charcoal ink (#1a1a1a), muted slate for secondary details (#5f5f5f), subtle borders (#e2e2e2), and an energetic blue (#0b5fff) for interactive links.

Tech Stack & Deployment

After previously wrestling with complex framework scaffolding and template churn, Locus was rebuilt as a lightweight, zero-framework static site generator written in Node.js. There is no Astro, no Next.js, and no client-side JavaScript required to render the prose.

The publishing pipeline is fast, lean, and self-contained:

  • Marked and marked-footnote to compile Markdown into clean, semantic HTML.
  • gray-matter to extract and validate YAML frontmatter.
  • [Sharp] to automatically optimize images to modern WebP formats during the build.
  • Pagefind for instant, offline-capable static full-text search.
  • Handcrafted RSS 2.0 (feed.xml), sitemap generation, and Schema.org JSON-LD structured data.

A single pnpm run build compiles over 1,000 posts spanning more than two decades into dist/ in under three seconds. Syncing the dist/ folder with GitHub and deploying globally on Cloudflare Pages happens automatically.

AI Collaboration

This site is custom-engineered and maintained through an active pair-programming collaboration between me, Antigravity (Google DeepMind's agentic AI coding assistant), and GitHub Copilot.1

While the ideas, thoughts, and words are primarily from my own rattled brain, Antigravity and Copilot did all the heavy lifting—architecting the bespoke static site generator, writing build and dev scripts, structuring semantic templates, tuning responsive CSS grids, and troubleshooting edge cases along the way. I do fix egregous errors of prose and logic in the posts.

Writing

Posts and pages are authored in Markdown and MDX, organized locally in content/posts/ and content/pages/. Each file contains frontmatter metadata for titles, descriptions, dates, and categories.

Drafting and editing happen in VS Code backed by the Front Matter CMS extension. Because all content is stored as plain Markdown files in a local Git repository, there is zero platform lock-in. If I ever decide to move platforms down the road, every word and note remains completely portable.

  1. Both AI Agents did the heavy lifting on the code, build scripts, and architecture so I could focus on writing without getting buried in framework churn. I take full responsibility for the quality of the prose and the quality of the ideas, can't blame them for my lousy ideas. ↩