Colophon

A colophon is the note at the end of a book describing how it was made. On the web it’s a page where you can be upfront about what’s powering your site.

Built with

fLaMEd fury is built with Eleventy, a flexible static site generator. The foundation is Eleventy Excellent by Lene Saile, which I’ve extended and customised over time. Styling follows the Every Layout methodology, and architecture the CUBE.css methodology. Code blocks use Prism.js for syntax highlighting.

Hosting

The site is built locally and deployed to local VPS via rsync. The VPS runs Caddy, which handles serving the static files, TLS certificates, and redirects. No Apache, no nginx, just one tidy config file.

In front of that sits a bunny.net pull zone. The server lives in New Zealand, so the CDN caches the site and serves it from somewhere closer to you. Deploying purges the cache, so you shouldn’t ever land on a stale page.

Code

The source lives in a self-hosted Forgejo instance, a lightweight software forge and a fork of Gitea. It runs on my own hardware and is reachable over Tailscale, so the repository stays private without relying on anyone else’s platform.

Version

The number in the footer is a version stamp: the year and month the current design shipped. 2402 means February 2024.

IndieWeb

Webmentions are received and sent by my own self-hosted endpoint. Feeds are available in Atom, RSS, and JSON formats. Microformats2 (h-card, h-entry) are baked into the templates.

Writing

TLDR; Notes → Typora → VS Codium → Eleventy → RSYNC → VPS.

1. Notes to drafts

If I’m out and about, the ideas start in the Notes app. Otherwise posts start in Typora. A simple markdown app that lets me focus on writing. It shows the formatting as I write, which Codium doesn’t. Great for getting ideas out of my head and into pixels. Rough notes, half-finished thoughts, all good.

2. Shaping in VSCodium

Once the draft feels like something, it moves into VS Codium. This is where I add the frontmatter (title, description, date, category, tags), tidy up the structure, and make sure it reads well. I also drop any images into src/assets/images/, these optimised by eleventy-image during the build.

3. Previewing with Eleventy

Running npm run dev spins up a local Eleventy server. Seeing the post rendered in the actual layout catches the things that looked all good in Markdown but don’t work on the page. Rogue line breaks, headings out of order, or an image that’s too big!

4. Deploying with rsync

When it’s ready, I run npm run build to generate the dist/ folder, commit to git, then deploy with a single rsync command to the VPS. No dashboard, no subscriptions, no pipeline to break, live in seconds.

Privacy

No tracking, no ads. I collect simple stats through Neat Stats, a privacy-first tool that shows me things like who’s linking to my posts and which pages are popular. A few pages pull in things from elsewhere too, like the guestbook and video embeds. I’ve listed the lot on the privacy page.

Changelog

Changes to the site over time are tracked in the changelog.