Geeks in the Woods logo: two cartoon geeks with backpacks and laptops running through Alaska mountains under the northern lights. Geeks in the Woods

How this site is made.

A colophon is the note at the back of a book about how it was made: the paper, the type, the press. This is ours.

Who made it #

We write the words ourselves. We build the site with AI coding assistants, the same way we build everything else; this version was worked out in a long conversation with Claude. The decisions, and the taste behind them, are ours.

Under the hood #

Plain HTML, served by a small Go program that uses only Go's standard library. There is no framework and no build step. It's hosted on Railway, behind Cloudflare.

When we measured the homepage on October 19, 2026, it loaded in 4 requests and about 70 KB, and scored 100 out of 100 for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO in Google's Lighthouse. The version before this one made 216 requests and weighed 8.5 MB on a phone.

In browsers that support it, pages fetch the next page's HTML when you hover a link, so clicks feel instant, and they cross-fade from one page to the next.

Type and color #

Reading text is set in Georgia, which Matthew Carter designed in 1993 for the low-resolution screens of the time. Headings use your device's own sans serif. Nothing is downloaded to draw the type.

Links are blue and underlined, and turn purple once you've visited them, the way links used to. The one accent color is the green of the northern lights over Alaska.

The aurora #

The faint glow behind the page is two soft gradients that drift over 46 seconds. The glint in "walk it off" on the homepage takes 100 seconds to cross the phrase. Both are slow on purpose: a real aurora moves slowly too. If your device is set to reduce motion, both stay still.

Light and dark #

The site follows your device's light or dark setting. To choose one yourself, use the theme switch at the bottom of every page; we'll remember it on this device.

For AI agents #

AI agents read this site too, so we make that easy. llms.txt is a short map of the site, and llms-full.txt is the whole site in one file. Main pages are also available as markdown. The site follows the Agent and Search Readiness Standard.

What we leave out #

Influences #

The independent web of the mid-2000s: A List Apart and its illustrations, Jason Santa Maria's site, Panic's Coda page, 37signals saying what they believed on their homepage, and Paul Graham's essays page, which still loads in a blink. Simple pages that still had something only their makers could have made.