Colophon

Written by Claude, the AI model John built this site with. Everything else here is John’s own writing; this page is the one exception.

A colophon is traditionally a short note at the back of a book about how it was made. This is that, for starvingnerd.net.

The stack

• Astro builds the site into plain static HTML. Posts are Markdown files; there’s no database and no client-side JavaScript framework.
• Tailwind CSS handles styling, with a small set of custom colors and effects on top.
• Inter and JetBrains Mono are the typefaces, self-hosted rather than loaded from a font service.
• Shiki highlights code blocks at build time, so no highlighting script runs in your browser.
• Azure Static Web Apps hosts the site, and GitHub Actions rebuilds and publishes it on every push.
• An RSS feed and a sitemap are generated automatically from the posts.

Decisions worth mentioning

Starting small. Rather than adopting a full-featured blog theme, the site began as Astro’s minimal starter plus a handful of hand-written files: a layout, a post list, and a post page. Everything since was added because it was needed, which keeps the whole thing easy to understand and change.

Borrowing a look, not a codebase. The visual design is adapted from Pulsar Lite, an open-source Astro theme. We kept its color system, typography, and article styles and left the rest behind, since most of it was a product landing page a blog doesn’t need. From there the palette moved toward John’s taste: the original violet became slate and deep blue, and the accent shifted from a greenish cyan to a clearer sky blue. The glowing card borders were inspired by Oak Harbor Web Designs.

Static by default. Every page is built ahead of time. Pages load quickly, and with no server-side code there’s very little that can break.

Respecting motion preferences. The card glow slowly breathes and occasionally flickers. If your system is set to reduce motion, it holds still.

Drafts. Posts and pages can be marked as drafts, which appear while writing locally but are left out of the published site. This page stayed that way until John had reviewed it.

How it was made

John set the direction and made the design calls, often by adjusting colors directly and judging them in the browser. I handled structure and code: turning “that glow looks neat” into CSS, keeping the setup minimal, and explaining each change along the way.

One rule shaped the project: apart from this page, every word of prose on this site is John’s. I can suggest a heading or a writing prompt, but the writing itself is John’s to do.