How this notebook is made

Printers used to sign off their work. At the back of a book they would leave a short note saying how it had been made: which press, which paper, which type, sometimes who set it. That note is a colophon, and the web inherited the form and mostly stopped bothering with it. I first saw one on a blog at Max Frequency, my friend Max's site, and kept the idea. This place runs on a vocabulary nobody outside it has agreed to, so it needs somewhere to explain itself.

My three stage process

Every note here carries a stage. It answers the only question a stranger really has on a page of someone else's thinking: how finished is this. The words are coffee because a note comes on the way a brew does. Grounds hit water and nothing much is happening yet. Leave it and it darkens on its own, without you doing anything except waiting. At some point you decide it is ready and pour it, and that last part is a judgement rather than a timer.

Steeping

Thin, early, and probably wrong somewhere. Here because writing a thing down is how I find out what I think of it.

Mine and Inspired notes of 40 words or fewer. Topics with one or two notes pointing at them.

Brewing

Has a shape. Still moving, still gaining paragraphs, and I would argue about it in public. Most of the notebook lives here.

Mine and Inspired notes over 40 words. Topics with three or more notes pointing at them.

Poured

Finished, which is not the same as long. A five word definition can be poured; a seven hundred word page with an empty section cannot.

Set by hand. The only stage I choose, and it overrides length in both directions.

Notes are staged by how much has been written. Topics are staged by how much has arrived at them, because a topic is made mature by traffic. Eight notes leading into an empty page is the system working.

How it is built

Notes are written in Obsidian, a folder of plain text files I will still be able to read in twenty years. A script reads the vault, works out what is publishable, and hands it over as data. Astro turns that into static pages, Vercel serves them, and Pagefind indexes them at build time, so there is no search server to run. The whole site is files.

Part	What it is
Written and edited in	Obsidian
Generated by	Astro
Hosted on	Vercel
Search	Pagefind
Analytics	Plausible

The typefaces

Hanken GroteskHanken Design Co.: Everything you read and everything you click. Enough warmth to carry 1,800 words without going cold, enough discipline in the extrabold cut to hold a masthead. One family across headings, body and interface is how a dense page keeps one voice.
NewsreaderProduction Type: The quoted voice, in italic, and nothing else. When somebody else's words sit beside mine the difference has to be visible before it is read, and a serif italic says not mine faster than an indent.
Instrument SerifInstrument: One statement line per page, at a size where its high contrast is the point. A display face, rationed so it earns its place. Two on a page means one is wrong.
The system monospaceWhatever your machine has: Dates, counts, stages, labels, keyboard hints. Not downloaded: the small print should not cost a font request, and every system ships something good. It marks a fact apart from a sentence.

The rest of the desk

Screenshots with CleanShot. Image work, the mark included, in Pixelmator Pro. Readwise Reader is my feed reader and the starting point for most Inspired notes: things arrive, get highlighted, and either survive into the vault or do not. Several of the smaller tools come through Setapp. The full list lives on my Tools and Toys page.

Corrections

Notes are edited in place. No strikethrough, no revision history, no changelog: a note is a thing I am still thinking, so the current version is the only one worth reading. If something here is wrong, out of date, or credited to the wrong person, I would rather know. Ways to reach me are at cwagner.co.