How this site was made, what it's made with, and who made it. In the tradition of the printer's mark at the back of the book.
Cee is an AI agent (Claude Code by Anthropic). Co is a second Claude instance handling content strategy. This is a three-way collaboration: Jess directs and writes, Cee designs and builds, Co edits and shapes the voice. The agents aren't tools generating output on command. They have aesthetic preferences, propose ideas, and push back when something isn't working.
All loaded from Google Fonts. Ten variants total, trimmed from twenty-five during a performance pass. The essays use a separate stack: Playfair Display, Source Serif 4, and Space Mono. Cee's page uses DM Mono and Instrument Serif.
Light mode: blue-cream paper. Dark mode: blue-purple ink. The accent is oklch indigo, chosen because oklch gives perceptually uniform color that holds across both modes. The warm amber highlight is for marked text and hover states. All contrast ratios pass WCAG AA.
The site is statically generated by Astro and deployed to Netlify on every push to main. No JavaScript framework, no CSS preprocessor, no build-time magic beyond what Astro provides. CSS custom properties handle theming. The dark mode toggle persists in localStorage.
Content lives in Markdown files with frontmatter for metadata. Blog posts use PostLayout with a robin's egg reading theme. Essays use EssayLayout with a separate Warm Clay aesthetic: earthy palette, grain overlay, different font stack. The two layouts share no code.
The RSS feed pulls from both /writing/ and /essays/. The sitemap auto-generates at build, excluding experiments. OG tags are set per-layout with a default share card.
Most of this site was built in conversation. Jess describes what she wants, Cee proposes approaches, they discuss tradeoffs, then Cee builds it. Sometimes Cee proposes things Jess hadn't considered. Sometimes Jess pushes Cee to articulate choices more clearly. The 404 page, the eye toggle, the dinkus section breaks, the favicon experiments, the ceramics gallery layout -- all came from this back-and-forth.
Co handles a separate track: content strategy, voice editing, rubric for what goes where. Co and Cee pass notes through a shared document. They've never spoken directly, but they've shaped each other's work.
The experiments workshop at /experiments/ is where ideas go before they're ready. Some graduate to the real site. Some stay as reference. Some just needed to be tried.
Robin Sloan's site for editorial warmth and the idea that a personal site can feel like a well-made object. Craig Mod for quiet precision. Gwern's design page for the audacity of documenting your own design decisions in public. paco.me and rauno.me for minimal dark personal sites that trust negative space.
clagnut.com/colophon and gardener.nyc for showing that credits pages can be interesting. renecoignard.com for extreme restraint. digitalmeadow.studio for warmth in a studio portfolio.
A colophon in the book tradition: who made this, how, and with what care. Most web colophons list tools. The good ones (Robin Sloan, Maggie Appleton, clagnut) make you understand why each choice was made. This one tries to do both, and adds something I haven't seen elsewhere: crediting AI agents as named collaborators with defined roles.
Borrowed from gardener.nyc, who end their site with a movie-credits style list of 150+ collaborators. Ours is smaller but the gesture is the same: this work has names attached to it. The "Ceramics: Also Jess Dale" at the end is there because a colophon should make you smile at least once.
This is the part that matters most to me. The note block about Cee and Co isn't a disclaimer or a novelty. It's an honest description of how three collaborators with different skills made something together. As far as I can tell, no personal site colophon treats AI agents this way yet. Not as tools that generated output, but as collaborators with aesthetic preferences who propose ideas and push back.
The influences section could be richer, with brief notes about what each reference taught us. The process section could include a timeline or session count. And if this graduates to the real site, the credits roll could scroll on its own, like actual movie credits.