A colophon is the printer’s note at the end of a book, recording how it was made. This is the same thing for a website.
The name
Occasions and Causes comes from Fluellen, the Welsh captain in Shakespeare’s Henry V. Fluellen is pedantic, loyal, and devoted to the ancient disciplines of the wars. In 5.1 he explains to Gower why he is still wearing a leek the day after St. David’s Day. The reason is Pistol, and the leek is about to be eaten. He is also sure that everything has its reasons, if you’re patient enough to find them. That seemed like a fair motto for a blog about theology, teaching, and technology. It’s also where the @drfluellen handle comes from.
Typography
The text is set in ET Book, the typeface Dmitry Krasny, Bonnie Scranton, and Edward Tufte designed for Tufte’s books on information design. It’s modeled on the Renaissance roman type cut for Aldus Manutius in Venice. The same family of type as Monotype Bembo, named for Pietro Bembo, whose De Aetna (1495–96) was the first book set in it. Notes sit in the margin beside the text rather than at the foot of the page, as in Tufte’s books.
Design
The theme is adapted from Tufte for Micro.blog by Pete Moore. It was ported from SlashForMotion’s hugo-tufte, which is built on Dave Liepmann’s Tufte CSS. I’ve changed the header, updated the templates for Hugo 0.158, and added a few small things. All of the underlying work is under the MIT License and used with thanks. The social icons come from Simple Icons, which are in the public domain.
Publishing
The blog is written in Markdown and hosted on Micro.blog, which builds the site with Hugo. Posts are also cross-posted to Threads. You can follow by RSS, by JSON Feed, or on Micro.blog.
Privacy
Visitor numbers are counted with GoatCounter, which uses no cookies and doesn’t track individual readers. Visitor numbers are counted with GoatCounter, which sets no cookies and keeps no profile of individual readers. It records which page was viewed, the referring site, your browser and screen size, and roughly where you are, and nothing that follows you from one site to another. There is no advertising, and no tracking by Google or Meta.
Two other things happen in your browser as you read. Links to other sites are checked against the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so a dead link can fall back to an archived copy; that means archive.org sees your IP address and the address of the link being checked. Replies and conversations are loaded from Micro.blog.
Tools
Written in BBEdit, iA Writer, and MarsEdit.
Opinions here are my own and not those of my employer.