Colophon
A colophon is a brief note about how something was made. In books it lives at the back, a quiet record of decisions that shaped the final thing. This is mine.
You're no doubt familiar with the old adage: "The toughest client is yourself." Well it's true. Designing your own site can be a frustrating experience.
When I've worked on personal projects before it's tended to be a messy, drawn-out, indecisive process. I'd struggle to produce anything I was happy with and I'd change my mind every five minutes and lose interest.
To avoid this happening again, I set myself four rules.
Stick to the MVP
With yourself as the client, it's too easy to change the scope as you get further into the project. I made a list of the site structure, detailed every essential element that would be on each page, and held the line.
Avoid trends
I deliberately avoided looking at other blogs, personal sites, or any external source of inspiration. It's easy to be influenced, consciously or not, only to find six months later you want to rip it all down.
Build it fast
I wanted to keep momentum to avoid backing out or changing my mind. I set a realistic schedule and stuck to it. Shipping something imperfect beats not shipping at all.
Make it personal
Probably the most important rule. Not lose sight of why I was making the site in the first place: to do things my own way, be myself, and communicate who I am. Not to impress anyone in particular.
Setting myself these rules made the decision-making process so much simpler.
I chose Astro because I love Cloudflare. Astro deploys to Cloudflare Pages with zero configuration. Static output, edge delivery, no server to manage. That combination is hard to beat for a personal site.
Astro also gets the defaults right: zero JavaScript shipped unless you explicitly opt in, content collections with schema validation, and MDX out of the box. It stays out of your way while still giving you the full component model when you need it.
| Framework | Astro |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS |
| Content | MDX |
| Fonts | Inter + JetBrains Mono |
| Syntax highlighting | Shiki (github-dark) |
| Analytics | Cloudflare Web Analytics |
| Webmention | Webmention |
| Hosting | GitHub Pages |
| CI / CD | GitHub Actions |
| Package manager | Bun |
The source is open at github.com/amaanx86/amaanx86.github.io . The site is statically generated and served from GitHub Pages.
Community signals
I use Cloudflare Web Analytics for privacy-first traffic insights and Webmention so conversations and references from other sites can flow back here.