Inspired by “Slash Pages,” of which I first learned in Manuel “Manu” Moreale’s “Slashes” (2024-06-01), this page describes how I build this site.
This site has been online since September, 2018. I build and maintain it using the Hugo static site generator and deploy it to the Cloudflare Workers platform. I do compatibility testing of the site on Chromium-based, WebKit-based, and Gecko-based browsers, testing on screen sizes for both desktop computing and mobile devices.
The site’s main typography changes from time to time as the mood (or guilt over making you download web fonts) strikes me, varying between either system fonts or a self-hosted variable web font or two. Even when I do use any web fonts, I show only system fonts on devices with screen widths under 1,024 pixels. I do this since those devices may be more likely to experience sub-optimal connectivity and, thus, would benefit from not having to download web fonts.
I style the site using bespoke CSS, with any further processing as needed through the css.Build capability that Hugo began including with v.0.158.0. For a good portion of the site’s life, I styled it with Sass, mainly to take advantage of nested styling; but nesting now is native in vanilla CSS and so, never having really needed many of Sass’s other special capabilities, I decided to go with straight CSS. Also: for a while, I tried Tailwind CSS, especially some of its earlier (simpler?) versions, but over time I gradually kept running into edge cases — yes, even on a simple site like this one — for which I found TWCSS not to be worth the shoehorning effort.
I have spent many hours trying to make the site as accessible as possible, often using tools provided by WebAIM, a service provided by Utah State University’s Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice. I strongly recommend other site owners refer to WebAIM and similar sites for help in this regard.
Similarly, the site functions properly either with or without JavaScript’s being enabled in your browser, for those of you who prefer to browse JS-free. You’ll be able to read all the content, but certain JS-powered extra features will either be invisible or otherwise unavailable. Note that, on the search page, a browser with disabled JavaScript will still be able to search the site using DuckDuckGo rather than the site’s built-in search.
Although I formerly used Fathom Analytics (and am still affiliated with it), I later decided the site’s visitor count was too small to justify the expense. However, I do miss Fathom on those extremely rare cases wherein one of my posts goes semi-viral, which I can still detect in much more limited ways via data from Cloudflare’s Web Analytics — speaking of which, see my privacy policy for additional information.
Please note also:
- For those pages displaying Git commit information, newer Git commits don’t necessarily reflect changes in previously published content.
- Displayed content statistics (word count and reading time) can vary based on the site-generation process, and don’t include any code blocks or
detailselements where applicable.
Latest commit (ff6e41177) for page file:
2026-05-10 at 4:22:13 PM CDT.
Page history