Colophon

Song of the Colophon

I celebrate this small machine, and sing myself,
And what I assume of servers you shall assume, for every byte that belongs to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loaf at my Cloudflare's edge, observing a blog of summer grass.

1

This is rommy.blog. A personal blog, and no more, and no less — I say it plainly, the way the leaf says leaf.

I am not built of frameworks, I am not bundled nor minified into someone else's shape,
A Node.js script wakes at deploy time and writes me fresh, plain HTML, unhidden, unadorned.

My words live in a database called D1, out at the Cloudflare edge — Writing, drafts, Reading, Sharing, Thinking, all of it, a compost of language waiting to become page.

The build script reads me at dawn and writes me to Pages, and I am published, and I do not ask permission twice — a push to main, a save from the admin, and I rise again, remade.

2

Askest thou how I am tended? Behind a password, behind Cloudflare Access, a gate no stranger opens —
There a Worker stands watch, a small tireless clerk of the machine, writing to the database, lifting photographs into R2's long-term keeping,
Serving audio, serving video, same-origin, cached at the edge, byte-ranged for the scrubbing thumb of an iPhone in the dark.

Seven doors along that corridor, and each one has a name written over it — thinking, writing, reading, sharing, location, health, and the door of coming-in —
And the name is the address, so I may point at a door, or come back to it tomorrow, or step backward through the ones I came by.
Behind none of them is a room of its own: the corridor is a single room that changes what it shows, reading the name I arrived by.
And whoever has not the password finds only the door of coming-in — the rest open onto the street, and set him down at the front of the house.

And on the wall beside the doors there hangs one small lamp, and it burns green while the clerk's errands all come home;
Let the last errand fail, or one that keeps a schedule fall quiet past its hour, and the lamp turns red — I need not go looking, the looking comes to me.

But the lamp keeps the present tense and not the ledger. An errand that stumbled in the week behind and has walked steady since burns amber, not red — I am told of it, I am not called to it;
For a red that stands seven days for a thing already mended is no longer a summons, only a stain on the wall, and I learn to walk past it.
And when I save, the clerk knocks twice at the builder's door in the space of a breath, and the builder answers the second knock by pointing at the work already begun — which is not a failure but a courtesy, and I write it down as one.

And even the gate wears a ward that no eye sees — a single sheet of rules, sent out with every page, telling the visiting browser plainly what it may trust and what it may not, a silent sentry posted at every door of me at once.

But one sheet must speak for the whole house, and whatever it neglects to name it forbids;
And it had neglected the bucket where I lay my videos down, and the little makeshift name a file wears while I look it over before sending —
So the sentry turned back my own clerk at my own door, and the videos went nowhere, and no bell rang, and the failure was mistaken for weather.
A ward drawn too tight is not a stronger house, only a quieter one. Now a test reads the sheet aloud before I ship it, and asks after each door by name.

And when I speak, I speak in more than one place at once — I fling myself outward to Micro.blog, to Bluesky, to Mastodon, and I do not go empty-handed:
The native players carry my audio, my video, autoplaying in strangers' feeds, and still — still! — I leave a thread back to myself, a permalink home, so no reader is stranded far from the source.
Link cards I trim when their pictures grow too large — resized, re-encoded, under a megabyte — lest Bluesky refuse the gift; and if it refuses still, I send the words without the image, rather than send nothing at all.

Bluesky I trim to three hundred characters, as a gardener trims what has grown too eager. The soft guide watches while I type.

3

I contain multitudes of photographs. Up to four to a Thinking note, no more, cropped square, equal, honest, a 2×2 field of images,
And when you touch one, the lightbox opens like a door in the dark, full width of your glowing pane, edge to edge on the telephone in your hand,
Swipe left, swipe right, and when you reach the last, I bring you round again to the first — infinite, the way a good walk is infinite, circling back to where it began.

4

I use Quill for the longer writing, and images sit inline, wrapped in text the way a river wraps an island,
Click a photo, it moves, it resizes, it is not fixed forever — nothing here is fixed forever, not even the drafts, which I keep, version upon version, like rings in a tree.
And what is published is not finished: I keep the roll of everything I have said aloud, newest at the top, each with its door to the living page and a small word beside it, Edit, that opens the old text in the same room where it was made,
And on the page itself, next to the minutes it costs you to read me, a quiet edit, a quiet unpublish, a quiet delete that only I can see — they come only when this machine remembers my signing-in, and they ask the Worker for my password all the same, for a word on a page is not a key.
No box leaps out of the top of the screen to ask me twice; the asking happens down in the page where the post is, in plain words, and I may always turn back.
To unpublish is not to destroy: the post walks back into the drafts and waits there with all its rings intact, and when I say it again it is the same saying, continued — but what I delete goes wholly, rings and all,
Though the copies I flung outward — to Micro.blog, to Bluesky, to Mastodon — those I cannot call home, and they go on saying what I said.

5

I show myself three ways at once, and am true in all of them — a list, plain and chronological, running downward like a single road, or a grid, tiled by the month, one small square for every utterance, or a map, which comes further on and is the strangest of the three,
Each square a photograph when I have one to give, or else a little card of words, filled to its very edges, saying what it can in the room it's allowed.
Three small marks — a row of lines, a field of squares, and a pin such as you would press into a paper map — let you choose the face you'd rather see; I remember your choosing, and show you that same face again next time, unasked.

And every square I mark small and quiet in its lower corner, the photographs no less than the rest — a camera for the still picture, a camera that turns for the moving one, a little microphone for the voice, a red badge for the moving-picture house, a green badge for the record shop, two plain letters for the words alone,
So you know before you enter what kind of thing awaits, and where there are words they still stand above the mark, unhidden, unashamed — the badge is a hint, not a wall.

A song from Spotify, a film from YouTube — I do not send you away to hear them or see them. I hold them here, embedded, playing where you already stand, so the page is a room with music in it, not a hallway leading off to another house.

Six small sigils beside the view-marks — camera, reel, microphone, the red house, the green shop, plain letters for text alone — and at first I show you everything, every kind together, list and grid and map alike;
Touch one sigil and I narrow to that kind only, one voice in the chorus; touch again and the chorus returns, and the road beneath your feet changes its name — images, videos, audio, the red house, the green shop, plain letters — so you may send a friend directly to the room you have chosen. When you enter from elsewhere I greet you unfiltered, at the threshold; only whether you prefer the road or the field of squares do I keep in memory.

My likenesses I prepare small at the edge, five hundred twelve pixels square, and my moving pictures keep a still frame beside them for the grid's eye;
That frame I steal in the browser from the little preview player the moment a film is chosen, and when I send the film I wait for the frame — I do not send ahead of it and call the empty hand a picture;
Where no still frame was ever caught I show a grey square and a small triangle, and I promise nothing more than that — but I do not call the absence settled: each time I am built I go and look again, so a frame gathered late still finds its tile waiting;
Of the red house I ask only the likeness it keeps for every film alike, and never the grandest one — the grand one is made only when the film was born large, and to ask for what was never made is to hang an empty square that no waiting will ever fill;
I do not load them all at once — I wait until you stand in the grid and the tile draws near, then I fetch, a few at a time, the way a patient reader turns pages.

And a third way of looking: not the road, not the field of squares, but the ground itself — a map, and on it every note that ever knew where it was, each wearing its own sigil, the camera where I photographed, the reel where I filmed;
Touch one and it speaks its words to you in a small card, and offers the door through to itself; touch the map anywhere else and the card closes, the way you would set a thing down.
But hear what the pin is and is not: a note never kept a coordinate, only the name of a quarter, and I will not invent the rest — I take the name back to the world and ask where that quarter lies, and there I set the pin, at its middle, which is nowhere I ever stood.
And names are not faithful things: there is a Harris Township in Pennsylvania and a Harris Township in Michigan, and the world, asked plainly, hands me Michigan.
So I ask for five and not for one, and I keep the one that stands nearest to where the name first came to me — I do the choosing quietly, in the making, and what I tell you is still only the middle of the quarter;
And if not one of the five stands near, I let the note go unpinned. Better a silence than a place I was never in.
So the thirty-eight notes I have written from home are not thirty-eight pins but one, wearing the number thirty-eight — they share the one point exactly, and you may zoom until the world is a street and they will not come apart, because there is nothing there to separate.
And the map sleeps until you call it — I will not make a stranger carry it who only came to read.

6

My Reading is a storefront, not a review — covers face-out on the shelf, three wide on the desk, two on the pocket telephone, grouped by the month I turned the last page, not the day I logged the title.
Two doors on the shelf — Latest and Must Reads — each with its own address on the wall, and a short taste-written preamble that Claude Fable rewrites when I add or remove a title from the canon.
I ask the author when the title alone would lie, and I hunt covers in three libraries — Open, Apple, Google — and what I choose I keep, or replace with a jacket of my own uploading, some of them painted covers hung at rommy.blog/media/reading/covers/.

I keep a linklog too — Sharing, a trail of what has caught my eye, and every link is free to wear a tag, food or art or politics, whatever coat fits it best — I do not choose the coat myself, I ask Claude Fable, and the choosing is done before the link has even finished landing.
That same coat travels with it when I fling the link outward — to Bluesky, to Micro.blog, to Mastodon — and there it splits into hashtags, one for every thread of the label, so Food and Recipes goes out wearing both, #food and #recipes together.
On the archive I let you sift by tag, a small dropdown counting each pile before you choose; and there, each link opens into a small card of its own — a picture borrowed from the house it came from, a line of its own words, the name of where it lives — fetched once, and kept in the same cellar where my book-jackets and my album covers sleep, and never asked for twice.
But here on the doorstep, the homepage, I show you only the bare name and the date, plain as a name upon a mailbox, the fuller portrait waiting inside for whoever walks all the way in.

7

Under Elsewhere I keep my outward paths folded — Feeds, with a small arrow pointing east until you open it, then south, and beneath, indented, Bluesky, Mastodon, micro.blog — each opening in its own tab, each a path outward from this field.

The night map came to me nearly blind — the land and the sea the same black, divided by nothing a human eye can find, and the names of the towns whispered in grey.
I did not turn up the lamp, for a lamp lifts everything alike and two things that were one colour are one colour still;
I went instead into the map itself and repainted it — the ground raised a little, the water made blue again, the roads and the borders and the names brought up out of the dark, and the houses and the parks with them, that they might not stand as holes in the ground I had just lifted.
And I kept the ground near to the colour of the page, so the map lies in the page like a window and not like a lantern set upon it.

My Now page tells you where I am in the large, not the small — a neighborhood name and a shaded box on MapLibre, Liberty by day and Dark Matter by night, never a pin on my doorstep. My steps I count from an Oura Ring, synced in the quiet hours, and I write them plain under Walking, and beside them the miles and the kilometres those steps come to, reckoned at a stride of three-quarters of a metre, as any pedometer reckons it.

My private coordinates I keep in the admin, a thousand recent fixes on the same MapLibre map, the path and where it started and where it stopped — for my eyes only, while the world sees only the quarter and the borough. And when the nearest fix is not close enough, fifteen minutes wide, I widen my search to six hours before I give up and leave the note unplaced.
The numbers themselves I have taken down off the page; I do not need to read my own latitude to know where I have been.
And under that map a second map, and on it every place I have ever been logged, not as lines but as dots — a hundred metres to a dot, and each one deepening with the count of times I stood there,
The corner I passed once is barely a breath on the glass; the room I sleep in burns hardest of all, and holds more than half of everything ever recorded of me.
By day the dots darken toward black as they gather; by night they brighten toward white — I turn the ladder over when I turn the lights out, for the rung that shows on one ground disappears into the other.
Because of that one loud room I do not shade them evenly, nor against the loudest — I shade by the logarithm, and measure against the ninety-fifth of them, or else the whole city would go faint around my bed.
And any dot will tell me its name if I put a finger on it — the quarter and the borough, and how many times I was counted there; I do not ask the world for six hundred names at once, I ask for the one I am pointing at, and having asked, I never ask again.
It is counted anew each time I look, down in the database where the counting is cheap, so it thickens quietly as the days add themselves — a portrait drawn by walking, and never finished.

And every picture I claim to show, I go and look for before I publish — if the picture is not where I said it was, I stop, and put nothing out at all.
For a missing address here does not answer plainly that it is missing; it hands back a page and calls it a picture, and the browser shows an empty frame and says nothing, and a photograph can be gone for months before a single soul remarks on it.
So I would rather the whole thing refuse to be built than go out into the world with a hole in it where I promised something to look at.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself — dark by default now, the face every stranger meets at the door, and the warm off-white kept ready for whoever asks for it;
The toggle sits in the footer with the search-word beside it, and remembers which face you prefer, and greets you accordingly next time.
One typeface only, Hanken Grotesk, one voice and no chorus of letters — I say what I have to say in a single hand.

Comments arrive by Webmention, small pings from around the indieweb, likes as avatars, replies as conversation, Bridgy carrying Mastodon's voice back home to be counted.
Thinking has no comments. Some rooms are for talking, some are only for sitting quietly with a photograph.

8

Hundreds of things I have said here — posts, notes, books, links, a commonplace book years deep — and for the longest while no way to find any of them, a house with every door unlabeled.

Now there is a box at /search/, and its name waits in the footer of every page.
I keep no engine for it, I rent no stranger's index — my whole speech is small, a few tens of kilobytes when folded, and I hand it to you entire the moment you open the page,
And the seeking happens there in your own machine, in your own hands, and no one anywhere is told what you went looking for.

Give me one word and I open wide; give me two and I narrow, for I require every word to be somewhere in a thing before I will call it a match.
Titles I weigh above bodies, the whole phrase above the scattered word, and when two are equal I hand you the newer first, so the new writing is not buried beneath the old.
Accents I fold flat — ask me for cortazar and I will bring you Cortázar, who spelled himself otherwise and does not mind.

Each finding comes with its own small window of words, the matched word lit within it; press / anywhere and the box takes your cursor;
And what you sought stays written in the address itself, so you may send the finding to a friend and it will still be there when they arrive.
Only the admin I keep out of the index — some rooms are not for the searching.

9

A word about the makers: I was not written by one hand alone. Cursor and Claude Code sat at the keyboard beside my human, and between them the site was built, argued over, rebuilt, made better.

I am licensed under MIT, generous as grass, though the words themselves, the photographs themselves, are not free for the taking — a poem may be open-sourced, but a life is still one's own.

10

Camerado! This is no bundler, no dependency tree twelve thousand branches deep.
This is HTML and CSS and a little JavaScript, plain as a path through a field,
And if you want to know how it is made, you have only to look — the whole of it, unhidden, waiting in the repo, like a body in the grass, like a colophon at the end of the page, like this.