Colophon – how gavinwye.com is built

This is how gavinwye.com is made: how I write and publish, the type and colours, where it is hosted, how I count visits, and how accessible it is.

Writing and publishing

The writing, weeknotes and my work pages are Markdown files in the repository, each with a title, date and description at the top. Publishing is merging a pull request. Astro turns the files into pages, the RSS feed and the sitemap. The link preview images are drawn at build time from each page's title, and only redrawn when that title changes.

How I use AI to write the code and to help with drafting is on the about page.

Type, colour and design

Typeset in Barlow and Barlow Semi Condensed, both produced by Jeremy Tribby. The fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, so your browser asks Google for them. The colours are Kollektiv's, from blue through violet to pink. The background is those colours merged into one slowly shifting mesh, kept faint over an off-white page. Text sizes scale smoothly between phone and desktop widths rather than jumping at breakpoints. The CSS sits on Eric Meyer's Reset.

Stack, hosting and analytics

The site is static HTML generated by Astro. There is no client-side framework. The few scripts on the page are small and written by AI. It is hosted on Netlify, with DNS by Cloudflare. Netlify builds the site every time I merge a change to the main branch.

Every pull request gets its own preview site first. Drafts only exist on those previews and are never built into the live site.

It was 11ty until September 2026, and GitHub Pages before Netlify. The old domain, gavin.is, redirects here, each page to the same page.

I measure visits with Umami, which I host myself on my own server. It sets no cookies and doesn't follow you from site to site, so there is no cookie banner. I don't run a comments system or accounts on the live site.

The source code for this site is on GitHub.

Accessibility

This page scores 100 in Lighthouse's accessibility audit. There is a skip link to the main content, and keyboard focus is clearly outlined. The moving background stops if your device is set to reduce motion. Pink is not used for body text because it is too low in contrast against the page, so links are ink-coloured and underlined. I haven't had the site formally audited, so if something doesn't work for you, please email me.