Colophon

This site runs on Ghost, an open-source CMS I chose precisely because it knows how to get out of the way. It stores the texts, handles subscriptions and what needs handling, and gives the rest back to me — the design, the tone, the silence between one line and the next. The content is mine; the form has become mine too.

The theme is called pablawn-v1. It began with the structure of Casper, Ghost’s official theme, but I kept rewriting it until it became something else: a small directory, a printed index. I did not want cards, nor large images shouting for attention. I wanted a list — dense, calm, navigable — where each text is only a line: the date on the left, the title in the middle, the reading time on the right, and a fine dotted line stitching the two together like the table of contents of an old book. When the mouse passes over it, the line lights up in the house color. That is the most movement I allowed myself.

The typography is deliberately stripped down. I do not load any web fonts: I use the system fonts of whoever is reading me, which keeps everything light and fast. Titles and body text stay in sans-serif; dates, reading time, and the site’s corners stay in monospace — that hint of terminal, of typed things, of file listings. It is a small detail, but it is what gives the site the scent of something handmade.

At the top of the page there is a single sentence, set in discreet italics: Things I build, questions I chase, a life I tend. It is not a slogan; it is more of a reminder to myself. Down below, in the footer, I left three quiet monochrome icons — one for my links, one for GitHub, and one for SourceHut, both under the name runawaydevil. They only gain color when you look for them.

The colors follow your mood and your system’s: there is a light mode, a dark mode, and an automatic mode, which decides on its own according to the hour of your day. The accent is a warm orange, the only louder note in a palette of grays.

Underneath everything, the theme is built with Gulp and PostCSS, and validated with gscan so it remains honest with Ghost. But the engineering matters less than the intention: I wanted a small, well-tended corner of the internet, without haste and without excess — a place that felt written, not assembled. If you made it this far, thank you for noticing the details. They were placed there one by one.

— Pablo Murad