Colophon
How this thing is built. For the curious, the skeptical, and the ones who read source code for fun.
A colophon is a publishing tradition - the note at the back of a book listing the typefaces, the printing house, the paper stock. On a personal website it's the equivalent: an honest accounting of how the thing was made and why it was made that way. This is mine.
The short version: everything here is hand-written PHP served by Apache on shared hosting, styled with plain CSS, and deployed through a custom promotion tool. No React. No Laravel. No Tailwind. Just a guy who's been building things on the web since before Stack Overflow existed, making the choices he wants to make.
That gradient runs across the top of every page. It started as a decorative detail and became a personality. Anchor Blue → Vivid Green → Rebecca Purple → Signal Red → Deep Red. It doesn't match anything. It doesn't need to. It stays.
Platform
Hand-rolled. No framework. Every route, every query, every response header - written directly. Not out of stubbornness, but because understanding your stack is a feature, not a burden.
Relational database with prepared statements throughout. PDO for the abstraction layer - lightweight, secure, and doesn't require an ORM to do its job.
mod_rewrite for routing, mod_headers for security headers (HSTS, CSP, Permissions-Policy, the works), mod_deflate for compression. All configured in .htaccess.
Plain CSS. No preprocessor, no build step. Custom properties for theming, a handful of utility classes, and inline styles where they make sense. Readable in any text editor.
Infrastructure
Not a VPS. Not a cloud function. Shared hosting - intentionally. It's constrained, it's affordable, and making things work well within constraints is more interesting than throwing resources at problems.
Static assets - CSS, fonts, images - are served from BunnyCDN pull zones. Fast edge delivery without the complexity (or price) of the big CDN players.
TLS via Let's Encrypt, auto-renewed through cPanel's AutoSSL. Ed25519 key, HSTS with preload, TLS 1.2 and 1.3 only. HTTPS everywhere, including the bits nobody visits.
Multiplexed connections, header compression. The hosting stack supports it; there's no reason not to use it.
Tooling
Primary editor. Extensions for PHP, Git, and not a lot else. The tool that gets out of the way.
AI pair programmer - not a code generator, a thinking partner. Handles the tedious parts so the interesting parts stay interesting. Used extensively throughout this site.
Version control via a private GitHub repository. Every file in this site - HTML, PHP, CSS, config - is tracked. History tells the story of the build.
Dev → Prod deployments run through a custom-built PHP tool that diffs both environments by MD5 hash, lets you cherry-pick files, and backs up prod before overwriting. No FTP drag-and-drop.
Typography
Icons
Free tier, loaded via the FA kit CDN. Solid style throughout - no duotone, no custom packs. Icons that describe things without needing to think about which icon describes things.
Security
Security isn't an afterthought here - it's a default. 25 years in IT infrastructure has a way of making that stick. The site runs a full suite of HTTP security headers (HSTS, CSP, Permissions-Policy, Referrer-Policy), a PGP-signed security.txt, an Ed25519 key published via WKD, and a responsible disclosure policy with a real response commitment.
Philosophy
I'm an IT infrastructure engineer. I've spent the better part of three decades telling organizations how to build things that are secure, maintainable, and don't fall over. This site is where I get to apply those principles to something I actually control end-to-end - without a committee, a change advisory board, or a ticket queue.
The choice to write plain PHP with no framework isn't nostalgia. It's intentional. Frameworks solve problems at scale. This site is not at scale. What it has is complexity I understand completely, dependencies I can count on one hand, and no node_modules folder the size of a small country.
Every design decision on this site was made because I wanted to make it - the gradient, the font combination, the block letters in the console, the security page that actually has personality. A personal site is the one place on the internet where you don't have to justify your choices to anyone. I'm making use of that.
If you found something interesting in here - technically, visually, or otherwise - say hi. The contact link is in the footer and the email is in the source.
Last updated: May 2026 - Brand guidelines - humans.txt