Every site has a colophon published or otherwise. This is mine.
The software. WordPress, self-hosted, since 2011. It’s a block theme all the way down: HTML templates and a theme.json, no PHP templates, no clunky page builder running the show. I love WordPress blocks and abilities. Get yours here.
The theme. Valencia: a custom theme I built while we were in Spain. It started as a simple rebuild of a blog layout I’d admired for years and massively evolved. Once it’s finished I’ll add a list of credits and inspirations here.
Everything you notice on the way down a page is my theme or my block plugin (bsee below) doing it: the marquee that fades off the sky as you scroll, the title that rises into place, the footer the page slides off of to reveal the wordmark. There’s no animation library. It’s CSS, most of it driven by your scroll position, and a few small scripts where CSS can’t know what you’re looking at.
The type. Two families, all served from this site, none from Google. Hanken Grotesk for headings and the big display moments. Archivo for the reading text, at 17 pixels with a loose line.
The blocks. Core blocks first, always. A small plugin of my own, Matt Blocks, adds the handful the site needs that core doesn’t have: the marquee title, the descriptor that scrambles as you hover the nav. GreenShift for the two layouts core can’t reach yet, the ticker (not the marquee) and the press logo rows.
The plumbing. Caching by WP Rocket. Images and scripts tuned by WordPress’s own Performance Lab. Hosted on Bluehost, which is a less-than-glamorous experience but fine.
The network. This site is also a fediverse instance. Follow @theinstantwin@mattdesiena.com from any online community powered with ActivityPub and new posts will arrive in your timeline. Replies from there show up under the post as reactions. Unlike LinkedIn or TikTok, I don’t pawn checking this off on AI. This is actually me.
Measurement. Google Analytics, first-party, no ad pixels. (Choice: keep this line, or drop measurement from the page altogether. Either is honest; saying so is friendlier.)
AI. Crawlers are told what they may do in robots.txt, using the Content Signals standard. The longer version is at /ai-policy/. I use my little knowledge of CSS and heavy knowledge of AI to build the site and not at all to write it. Every word here is typed by me, in Apple Notes first, then pasted in.
The rest. Written and maintained from NY, NY.