Colophon
Colophon
This site is maintained as an archive of work by Michael Shafia. The following list enumerates the materials of its construction. It is thorough by intention.
Typography
- Body, headings
- EB Garamond, designed by Georg Duffner and Octavio Pardo. Released under the SIL Open Font License.
- Metadata, accession numbers
- JetBrains Mono, designed by Philipp Nurullin and Konstantin Bulenkov. Released under the SIL Open Font License.
- Interface fallback
- Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson. Released under the SIL Open Font License. Reserved for form controls.
- Numerals
- Old-style figures (
onum) are enabled via OpenType feature settings on the body.
Materials
- Background
- A warm cream,
#f5f1e8. - Text
- A near-black,
#1a1a1a. - Accent
- A muted red,
#7a2e2e. Used sparingly. - Hairlines
- Ten-percent ink, drawn at one-half pixel where the rendering permits.
Construction
- Framework
- Next.js, App Router.
- Styling
- Tailwind CSS, with theme tokens defined in CSS.
- Content
- MDX files, one per item, located in
/content/items/. - Reader
next-mdx-remotefor server-rendered MDX;gray-matterfor frontmatter parsing.- Type system
- TypeScript, strict.
- Linter
- ESLint, with the Next.js shared configuration.
Generative mechanism
- Illusory items
- The Illusory section of the index is produced by a reversible procedure. A hex address (lowercase alphanumeric) is normalised and used to seed a Mulberry32 pseudo-random function; outputs are consumed in order to select the medium, title, years, and description from curated word lists. The same hex address yields the same entry on every request.
- Inspiration
- The mechanism is adopted in spirit from libraryofbabel.info, which realises the contents of Jorge Luis Borges’s La biblioteca de Babel as a deterministic bijection. The implementation here is original and operates over a much smaller output alphabet; the hexagonal chamber diagrams and monospace typesetting of the source are not adopted.
Hosting
- Production
- Vercel.
- Domain
michaelshafia.com.- Analytics
- None at present.
External services
- Fonts
- Loaded via the
next/fontmechanism, self-hosted at the edge. No requests are made to third parties at runtime. - Book covers
- When an item carries an ISBN, a cover image is fetched from Open Library at build time.
- Video embeds
- YouTube’s standard iframe embed, used without an API key.
Provenance
- Author
- Site written and maintained by Michael Shafia, with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).
- Specification
- The full build brief is committed to the repository at
SPEC.md. - License
- Source: not yet declared. Item content: all rights reserved by the author.
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