This site runs on WordPress, self-hosted, because I wanted the boring, durable thing: a database of my own writing that I can back up, export, and move. The theme is called Marginalia and I built it myself, with occasional help from people who actually know PHP. It is one column, no webfonts, no analytics, no scripts it doesn’t need. The body face is whatever good serif your machine already has — Iowan Old Style if you’re lucky, Palatino or Georgia if you’re not, and there is nothing wrong with Georgia.
The accent color is oxblood, chosen to match the buckram on a 1911 set of Ruskin that sat unsold in the shop for nine years. Somebody finally bought it the month before we closed. I kept the color.
Design principles, such as they are: the text column is about sixty-five characters wide because that’s what two centuries of book designers converged on; links are underlined on hover because links should look like links; the archive is a plain list organized by year because the plain list is the correct technology for archives and I will not be taking questions.
There is an RSS feed, full-text, because a site like this without a feed is a shop with the door painted on. If you use a feed reader, you are this site’s preferred kind of visitor.
The writing is drafted longhand in whatever notebook is nearest, typed into a plain text file, and pasted in here when it stops embarrassing me. Errors, opinions, and comma splices are my own.