Colophon

Built

The site is plain static HTML, generated by Jekyll from Markdown, a few Liquid templates and some YAML data files. There’s no framework, no bundler and no build step beyond Jekyll itself. The CSS is written by hand, and there’s a small amount of vanilla JavaScript for the menu, the theme switch and one or two other things.

The illustrations, including the buoy on the 404 page, are hand-written SVG and CSS. They respect your reduced-motion setting.

Hosted

The source lives in a public GitHub repository. Every push to main is built and served by GitHub Pages on my own domain, orrin.uk. An earlier version of this page said the site ran on an old ASUS PC in my bedroom. Those days are over, and the PC is enjoying a quieter life.

Written

Mostly in Kate on openSUSE, committed with Git. There’s more about my setup on the uses page.

Type and colour

Headings and body text are set in Inter, and code in JetBrains Mono, both loaded from Google Fonts. The accent colour is a warm orange (#e0603c in light mode), borrowed from the sea buoys off Brighton beach. The site follows your system’s light or dark preference, or you can choose with the button in the header.

Private

There are no analytics, no cookies, no adverts and no tracking scripts. If you use the theme switch, your choice is saved in your own browser’s local storage and goes nowhere else. The only third party involved is Google Fonts, which serves the typefaces.

Accessible

I’ve tried to make the site work for everyone: semantic HTML, a skip link, visible keyboard focus, sensible contrast in both themes, and no motion if you’ve asked your system for less. If something doesn’t work for you, please tell me and I’ll fix it.

History

orrin.uk first went live in November 2022 on an off-the-shelf Jekyll theme. Since then it has been rebuilt by hand more than once. The changelog has the full story.

Credits

There’s a humans.txt if you’d like the short version, and a few small surprises for anyone curious enough to view the source.