Appendix
About this website.
Fourth Edition: Selectric was first published on January 5, 2023. The site is built with Eleventy and hosted by Netlify.
Body text is set in the in-progress Gooper Text by Very Cool Studio, purchased through Future Fonts. Headings are set in TT2020 by Frederick R. Brennan, licensed under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1. The Chinese text is set in 隸變繁體 (Libian TC), where available.
ACCESSIBILITY
I strive to make this website widely accessible, to the extent of my knowledge and ability.
- The website uses native and semantic HTML as much as possible.
- The website is fully functional without JavaScript.
- Two theme options are provided: a light theme and a dark theme.
- No excessive motion or animation is used.
- The website is fully functional across viewports, including mobile and desktop screens.
- The website has been tested with the MacOS VoiceOver screen reader, to the extent of my ability as a beginner screen reader user.
- All images have alternative text.
- Colours are chosen to provide enough contrast between foreground and background.
- Media files are compressed to reduce bandwidth.
If you encounter any accessibility issues on this website or failures to meet these promises, please let me know.
Known issues:
- Videos and screencasts are not accompanied by sufficient video descriptions.
- Some alternative text may be unhelpfully repeated between related images during periods of more hasty publishing.
- For further optimisation, image files may be split up into multiple files of different sizes.
INTENTIONS
I would like this website to
- feel like me
- feel like paper in your hands
- be accessible
- be a worry stone
- change with me
- be lightweight
- celebrate things i'm excited about
- hold space for my friends
- feel intimate and lovely
- cherish the form
- hold sacred the text
- abound with poetry
P.S. I would like to write because I feel the muscle sore from disuse. I feel it acutely, when I reach for the words and end up grasping in that lacuna. Little me wanted to be a writer. Maybe I can work at it, for her.
WORKING NOTES
- i'd like to use shanghainese in some way!
- there is slightly too much fiddly html in these pages just for some custom styling... i would like to fall back to more markdown and trust the defaults. see, this page! almost nothing needed at all. what's a couple of
<br>s between indie webbers? - is this font readable in long-form text?
- is this font file too big?
- trying to put up some more writing
- more consideration to the chinese font
- webmentions? [edit 240329: added a link to accept webmentions, but not showing anything yet]
- more writing in chinese?
- book curses - PLAGUE BE UPON YE BOTS WHO WOULD SCRAPE OUR DATA...
- links to headings
- attention to print styles
- are there forms of interaction that i'd like to embed in here?
- guestbook?
- open heart protocol!! https://openheart.fyi/ by Mu-An Chiou (via Tracy Durnell)
- accessibility statement
- found a generator (via Mu-An Chiou) to look into https://www.w3.org/WAI/planning/statements/generator/#create
robots.txt[edit 240329: done? following Chris Coyier’s post]- make sure faded colors are still high enough contrast
set up rss[edit 240326: done!]- optimize images... use webp?
- microformats?
- add video descriptions and transcripts to videos
- look into prose.io?
- .htaccess https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/blockin-bots/
- "design engineer"
CHANGE LOG (WHEN I POST ABOUT IT, AT LEAST)
December 31, 2025
Hopped on the train from Jekyll to Eleventy!
Also, noting that at some point we have moved from hosting on GitHub Pages to Netlify.
Oct 28, 2025
Finally converted old SCSS stylesheets to vanilla CSS. Just had to change the comment syntax. It seems to still work — I thought there was some weirdness with Jekyll that meant I had to use a CSS preprocessor, but maybe not? Thank goodness.
Feb 29, 2024
selectric on cyanotype — dark mode theme for my website. this felt like it took so long and that was frustrating (feeling like i sometimes only have snatches of time), but i'm really glad i figured out a direction i feel so excited and happy about. i wanted it deep and moody like winter evenings, rich like fabric, glinting like gold leaf. i think i resisted this for so long but i'm really enjoying it and it's something i desperately needed to do for accessibility as well :)
thanks so much to @jamie for the invaluable feedback :')
Jan 3, 2024
updated the website with a new font (thank you @nonnullish !! :)) and the hopefully lightweight stickies/receipt aside (spent forever figuring out how to import a debounce function). i loved the previous font but am excited about the improved versatility of this one for longer-form writing :)
Oct 20, 2023
a couple tentative new pages for the website: /carry/ and /index/
kayserifserif.place/carry/: a delightful mishmash, using <iframe>s, of some of my friends' websites, with all the unexpected side effects and errant javascript and console logs <3
kayserifserif.place/index/index.html: an ongoing index of themes in the work. i'm trying to learn more about the craft of indexing, both as traditionally conducted for a Published work like a book, as well as in the fuzzier context of a live, updating work like a website/portfolio. what does that look like? i know the answer is probably something algorithmic, or tools-for-thought-ish, but for now i like the exercise of taking time to reflect on the work and manually tease out relevant and interesting themes.
other notes: i love this light font, but it can be hard on the eyes. i'm trying to improve the contrast, but apologies for it not being quite there yet!
Feb 6, 2023
i loved the look of these program notes, how the music and the (movement titles?) evoke such a strong sense of a journey
i wanted to take inspiration for something similar on the “about” section of my website
Jan 6, 2023
i have a new website and i love it 🥹🥹
this is the first major redesign i've done in maybe 6 years. i'm so happy about it because i know my interests and taste have evolved and become much more specific and clear to me, and this makes me feel like i can finally let other people see it as a rep. of me & my work!!
and more than that, it finally starts to feel like my place on the internet — somewhere i can come back to and tend regularly and sit in and have fun with. there are more interactive and experimental elements i want to add but this feels like a much better starting point
i also wanted to bring in those elements of metadata and archiving and front/back matter that i like so much! the table of contents is inspired by diana wynne jones, and the metadata for each project is tracked in a spreadsheet that i keep for myself
my goal is to make it feel lightweight but elegant, detailed but relaxed, and clean but warm!! the same way this typeface by @mjmcmaster (like Light Italic, and Vulf Mono) is sort of a simple monospace but so lovely and warm and sweet (thank you so much for this!!)
(p.s. there is also a 404 page)