Colophon

This site is a personal project built with Astro, written in plain markdown, and deployed to Cloudflare Pages. The source lives on a self-hosted Forgejo instance. The content lives in an Obsidian vault, where essays are drafted and revised.

The stack: Astro content collections with a Zod frontmatter schema running in strict mode; the default Markdown pipeline for footnotes and tables; a small custom remark transformer for images. No CSS framework, no runtime JavaScript, no trackers, no cookies, no analytics.

The philosophy is portability. Everything here is plain text in a git repository. The build is static. The hosting is free and commodity (Cloudflare Pages today; Codeberg Pages or any other static host tomorrow, if that becomes necessary). If the whole stack disappeared, the essays would still be readable as plain Markdown files. That is the point.

The writing process: Unless explicitly mentioned, the content on this site is original and my own. My writing process has three phases:

  1. I record and transcribe my thoughts in English, which is the primary language I think in. This process is constant, and I use whatever device I have on me, from my phone and laptop to a handheld voice recorder that I take when walking the dogs in the forest. Then, in Obsidian, I use AI to remove filler words and structure the text into blocks without rewording. Keeping statements verbatim, only getting rid of filler words1. All transcripts are recorded in an Obsidian Vault structured for this purpose.

  2. I then manually compile those thoughts into ideas, splitting them into distinct documents, establishing relationships between ideas, and defining a sequential order. Only when a pattern emerges, sometimes after additional research, do I start to compile standalone documents that will host the essay or article to be published.

  3. Finally, I begin the slow process of shaping the document into a readable article or essay. I have a number of drafts in progress at the same time, spending no more than three days per month working on final content. During this phase, I use writing software to assist with proofreading, grammar review, and readability improvements.2

For further background on how I use AI, check out the article Path of Least Resistence

Footnotes

  1. I’ve built an agent with strict rules for converting and structuring transcripts into concise text blocks without filler words. There is an article in draft explaining how to build one. Eventually, it will be published. ↩

  2. Lately, I’ve been using Grammarly, primarily for its UX rather than the quality of its output. I am always looking for open‑source and privacy‑first alternatives. Recommendations are welcome. ↩