Colophon
There is a trend I notice in the personal site community where it seems like website creators can only make websites about websites.
I guess it makes sense: people who feel compelled to make sites tend to be passionate about the internet, its technology and its potential (and I totally understand that). But it can be a little repetitive to read after a fashion. Can you imagine if every song was about singing? I think the medium has more potential than that.
So I've largely tried to resist that impulse for most of this website. But! This page is the exception.
What is a colophon?
If you've never heard this word before, please don't feel stupid. It was new to me, too, until very recently.
In traditional publishing, a colophon is a section at the end of some printed books that contains information and/or meta-statements about the making of the book itself.
This has been a tradition for hundreds of years; these days, it might contain behind-the-scenes details about the typefaces used in the book, say, or the word processing software the author favoured, how the book cover design came about, or how the writer and editor felt about the project throughout the process. You know: all that sort of wossname.
Not surprisingly, the HTML homebrew community has adapted this concept for use on the modern web. So now, an online colophon is generally a page about the making of the website in question - essentially a record of the technology, strategy and philosophy that went into its creation.
About mikehive.com
I hand-wrote all the code for this website in TextEdit (which, for non-Mac users, is basically the MacOS equivalent of Notepad - just a completely basic, no-frills, system default plaintext editor).
mikehive.com is written and maintained using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a little tiny bit of PHP under the hood to enable a couple of specific details (eg., the hit counter on the homepage and the contact form).
There is no Wordpress or other content management system at work here. My "content management system" (sarcastic quotation marks) is simply me manually editing .html files in a text editor. (Occasionally I might use BBEdit, another free app, to batch-replace or update something sitewide to avoid having to edit every file one-by-one.)
Like any self-respecting world wide wonk, I take my craft quite seriously. My approach to making this site has been very considered and meticulous, and as a result, there are a number of things about it of which I am now quite proud:
- Fully validated, standards compliant semantic static HTML
- No trendy bullshit frameworks / libraries - just old-school native web code
- Fully mobile responsive (why are so many indie web pages desktop-only in these enlightened times? Shocking to me)
- Works perfectly fine when JavaScript fails / is turned off - ideally you shouldn't even realise anything is missing
- Loads quickly, and is thoroughly optimised and respectful of user data costs (at the time of writing, the entire homepage - assets and all - is around 250kb)
- No Analytics / third party tracking scripts
- No goddamn hamburger menu (is creativity dead? It's not even a good icon... but maybe that's a rant for another day)
- No adverts, no popups, no cookie consent messages; nothing to get between you and the content
- No assets held on third-party servers (I do use Google Fonts, but the files are self-hosted - if anything happens to the Google servers, my website won't be affected). By the way, I also hand-rolled my own audio player interface for the Music page (where I might otherwise have used a Bandcamp or Soundcloud embed), just so I could host my own audio files
- Proudly and absolutely not optimised for SEO in any way at all because fuck that
I consider my site to be part of the indie web / personal web / small web movement(s), and I agree with the core tenets of belief therein (that you should own your domain name, own your content, and not let the likes of Facebook and Twitter and co have first dibs on it).
I also very much believe that there are many excellent reasons to have a personal website other than self promotion. mikehive.com is my sincere and loving attempt to embody that conviction.
Hope you like it!
