A Handrafted Website

The making of a website can be quite a story. Mine is carefully handcrafted with html and css only. What I know about website development comes from the Technical Institute of Hands On.

Most bloggers, I expect, are like me and rely on the contributions of many others to publish their website. When you view my blog, you are not only seeing my work but also the work of website domain registrars and domain name servers, website server host providers, open source software developers, graphic artists, and more. I’m happy to give credit where credit is due.

Website Infrastructure

Due to the Snowden revelations in 2013 and what has come to light since then, I operate my website outside of my home country, the USA, in countries where privacy and freedom of speech seem to be better protected. I do this just because. The USA, land of the free and all that; yeah, right. Anyway, I don’t write anything terribly controversial. But, some things just matter.

My domain registration and domain name server are through OrangeWebsite in Iceland.

My website is hosted on a Virtual Machine (also known as a virtual private server, VPS) running OpenBSD -current at OpenBSD Amsterdam in The Netherlands.

I serve my website with OpenBSD’s httpd(8).

I provide transport layer security (TLS) through Let’s Encrypt.

Website Fonts

For my site’s body font, I use Work Sans by Wei Huang. Work Sans is based loosely on early Grotesques fonts and is optimised for on-screen text usage at medium sizes. This font is licenced for use under the SIL Open Font License, 1.1

I recently changed to Special Elite by Astigmatic for my header font. I had been using Lucky Typewriter by Lukas Krakora and before that 1942 Report by Johan Holmdahl. These latter two seem not to get much development so I made the change. Special Elite mimics the Smith Corona Special Elite Type Number NR6 and Remington Noiseless typewriter models. This typewriter style of font reminds me of the typewriter my grandfather gave me when I was in high school. Back then, you either wrote out homework assignments by hand or typed them out on a manual typewriter. The typewriter was already very old when I received it. I have no idea where Grandpa got it, nor how long he had it before he gave it to me. Special Elite font is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 for personal or commercial print or digital projects and products.

Website Artwork

Carrie Franzwa drew the stickfigure art you see on my home page. This is copyrighted artwork. I purchased licenses to use this artwork on my website from TeachersPayTeachers.com and ClipArtOf.com