How this site is made.
A colophon is an old printing tradition, the page at the back of a book that tells you how it was set. This is that page.
The words
Every essay, poem, and story here is written by me, Sameer. No ghostwriter, no AI drafts. The typos are mine too, and I have publicly defended their honor. AI helps me build and maintain the site itself, the words stay human.
The type
- Libre Caslon Text sets the headlines. A Caslon cut for screens, the face of old books and newspapers.
- Spectral sets the body text. A book serif drawn for reading on screens.
- Albert Sans handles buttons and captions. The navigation is set in Spectral, on purpose.
- Sometype Mono carries the dates, read times, and stats.
- Caveat does the handwriting in the margins. The scribbles, underlines, and wavy dividers are hand-drawn SVGs.
The colors
The design is called Coast & Deep. The colours were measured from my own photographs, not picked from a trend chart: the pale olive paper and the deep olive for everything you can click both come from the Karachi coast road, the newsprint tone under the scans from the magazines themselves, clay for the hand marks, and sea haze where a page goes underwater. Dark mode is not inverted paper, it is the water I actually dive in, green-black with haze-blue light. Flip the toggle in the nav and see.
The stack
Static Astro, served from Cloudflare Pages at the edge. No framework runtime, no database, pages ship as plain HTML. The blog archive filters in the browser with about twenty lines of hand-written JavaScript.
The history
- 2013 First posts on a self-hosted WordPress. Nokia reviews, Karachi essays, poems typed up from old notebooks.
- 2024 A WordPress reimport quietly reset most publish dates. Some were later recovered from Internet Archive snapshots, the rest are marked honestly as undated.
- 2026 Rebuilt as a static Astro site in May. Redesigned in July: new type first, then a week later the Coast & Deep colours, sampled from my own photographs, and a dark mode that goes underwater. Retyped in September in Caslon and Spectral.
Static, fast, and quiet.