Colophon
A colophon is the note at the end of a manuscript saying who made it and with what. It is the oldest form of build metadata.
Sources
20 essays, 20 talks, 10 outside pieces and 5 projects, the oldest of them from 2017. Here is what they are made of.
The name
Plutarch asked it of a thirty-oared galley. The xebec is only a ship the question happens to fit.
A xebec is a three-masted ship of the Mediterranean, fast and lateen-rigged and rebuilt constantly — a working hull kept at sea by replacing it a piece at a time. The Athenians kept Theseus' galley the same way, plank for plank, until the philosophers wanted to know whether the thing in the harbour was still his ship. Same question: how much of a thing can be swapped out before it stops being that thing. Which is what this site is about, put in wood rather than in data.
Type
Instrument Serif for display, Spectral for body text, both served from Google Fonts. Dates are set in old-style figures so the numerals sit into the line rather than shouting over it.
Colour
Three colours with a reason beats four with a mood.
The palette is the portolan wind hierarchy, a convention of medieval sea charts: black for the eight principal winds, green for the eight half-winds, red for the sixteen quarter-winds. Red doubles as the active state and the drop cap. There is no fourth colour, deliberately.
- Principal winds
- Half-winds
- Quarter-winds
The rose
North is red because that is a navigational convention, not because red looked nice there.
The compass rose computes its own geometry rather than being drawn: eight points, each split lengthwise into a filled and an outlined half so it reads as faceted brass instead of as a symbol. Its bezel carries the same thirty-two divisions as the bearing lines behind it, so the rose and the rhumbs are visibly one instrument.
The margin
Like this one. It is never empty — that is the whole discipline of the layout.
Every essay carries a margin column. Glosses are written inline in the prose as Obsidian callouts and lifted out at build time by a small remark plugin, which means a note is anchored to its paragraph rather than to a paragraph number that drifts the moment you insert a sentence. Below 880 pixels the margin moves above the text and the alignment script stands down.
Machinery
Astro, markdown in git, static hosting on Cloudflare Pages. No CMS, no database, no server: writing a post is a commit. Four content collections are schema-checked at build time, so a typo in a frontmatter field fails the build rather than rendering wrong. Comments, when they are switched on, are Giscus threads living in GitHub Discussions — no trackers and no third-party cookies. The feed carries full text, not teasers.
Provenance
An archive with holes in it is a worse thing than no archive, so the images came across too.
This writing lived on Ghost at mikekiser.org until 2026. Everything moved across with its slug intact, images and all, and the old domain redirects here path for path — so a link made years ago still lands where it was aimed.
Written and kept by Mike Kiser. Corrections are welcome.