Colophon
==============================================

What is a colophon?

...a brief statement containing information
about the publication...

How is this site built?

My personal site has been rebuilt many, many
times, mainly in WordPress. I think this is
version 5 or 6. Where versions 4-6 never
actually saw the light of day. With the large
amount of data I track, I kept hitting storage
limitations and everything was cobbled
together with a shoebox and hopes and dreams.

Dependancies

At the crux of it, the site is built with:

Laravel

VueJS

TailwindCSS.

I manage all of these via Composer and NPM.
Some of the most notable packages I use are:

Chart.js for activites and stats pages

Hugeicons Pro for all the icons

Tiptap editor for manual posting

MapLibre for maps and OpenFreeMap for the
tileset. I use Mapbox for generating static
maps on the timeline view

Twemoji for rendering emojis as images

highlight.js for code syntax highlighting and
Plyr for video embeds

Inertia.js for connecting Laravel and Vue,
plus SSR so I can use microformats

A bunch of Spatie packages:

spatie/browsershot for generating dynamic open
graph images

spatie/laravel-backup for backing up the
SQLite database every 12 hours and syncing new
assets once a day to Cloudflare R2

spatie/laravel-medialibrary for managing all
the different asset types connected to entries

spatie/laravel-feed for creating the different
feeds

Hosting

The website is hosted on xCloud , everything
auto-deploys and builds on the server when I
push to the master branch on Github.

Data & Entry Types

This website is very data-heavy. I track a
large range of different information, most of
it automated via the IndieWeb PESOS approach.
The rest are manually posted from my mini
custom CMS.

I currently log the following:

Activities syncs from Strava every 5 minutes

Sleep syncs from Health Auto Export every 12
hours

Food syncs from Rovi every 15 minutes

Media syncs from Trakt every 10 minutes

Events

Appearances

This Week With syncs from This Week With once
a day

Flights

Places syncs from Swarm (Foursquare) every 10
minutes

Fuel

Projects

Articles

Notes

Now Page

The now page is something I've always loved
the idea of. It gives people a snapshot of my
life right now.

The design was inspired by Apple's iOS
widgets.

All the real-time data, such as the current
battery, location, time / timezone, weather,
and Apple Rings, are all run from an Apple
Shortcut that runs every hour in the
background on my phone.

API Enrichment

I try to make my life as easy as possible,
which is why I try to automate and PESOS as
much as possible; for me the easiest path is
the one that's going to keep me consistent. If
it takes ages to log something, I simply won't
track it.

One of the things I use to help me is a bunch
of enrichment APIs that make finding an
address, a film, a petrol station super simple
but also super accurate. Here are some of
them:

TMDB for film and TV artwork

Hardcover for searching books and downloading
cover artwork

Google Places / Geocoding for searching
addresses and reverse geocoding current
location

PetrolPrices for finding local fuel stations
near me

LogoStream for airline logos, plus route
information between two airports

Logo.dev for fetching logos for fuel stations
such as BP Garage

Google Favicons are used in prose for links to
external sites.

Design & Features

The design and features are an amalgamation of
my old site's design, along with help from my
own ideas and opinions, help from LLM's and a
bunch inspiration from other websites, some of
which include but are not limited to:

People

https://aaronparecki.com/

https://www.trovster.com/

https://www.zachleat.com/

https://cleverdevil.io/

https://hacdias.com/

Companies

https://strava.com

https://flighty.com/

AI & LLMs

I use a human in the loop approach to design
and development. While I am a web designer as
my day job and can still read and write code
by hand. For me, I enjoy the process of
building things. I have so many ideas that,
with the help of LLMs it increases the speed
in which I'm able to test and try out new
ideas.

I'm still very picky and opinionated about how
the code is written, how things are structured
and formatted, and I also have high standards
with how things look when it comes to work I
publish.

I see AI as a tool that gets me from idea to
execution with genuine human care and thought
behind every feature I build.