(OKLCH is the cylindrical form of OKLab — lightness, chroma, hue — designed so that equal numeric steps look like equal visual steps.)

The problem with picking colours by eye is not taste; it's fairness. This site is six sections that must feel like siblings — same lightness, same saturation, different hue — and human eyes are famously bad judges of that. A yellow and a blue with the same HSL "lightness" are nowhere near equally light. OKLCH fixes the yardstick: oklch(0.88 0.055 h) is perceptually the same pastel whatever you substitute for h, which is the whole mirror idea in one line of CSS.

Posts go one step further. Each post's surface drifts from its section's base by a few degrees of hue and a few hundredths of lightness — enough to feel, too little to name — and the drift is a pure function of the slug:

export function shadeFor(section: SectionKey, slug = '') {
  const base = SECTIONS[section].hue;
  const h = hash(slug); // FNV-1a — stable forever, everywhere
  return {
    hue: base + ((h & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 16, // ±8°
    L: BASE.L + (((h >> 8) & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 0.06, // ±0.03
    C: BASE.C + (((h >> 16) & 0xff) / 255 - 0.5) * 0.03, // ±0.015
  };
}

Try it — this widget runs the real function, live:

Deterministic means accountable. The same post is the same colour forever, on every build, on every machine. No database row stores it; no human maintains it. And because the palette is a function, it can be tested like one — the build runs every derivable shade against WCAG contrast thresholds and refuses to ship if a single combination fails. Taste gets you a nice palette; a build gate keeps it nice.

The full derivation lives in the colophon, because on a site about a mirror, showing your work is the brand.

Personal sites die of dependency, not of neglect. The essay from 2009 is fine; the CMS under it is not. The database needs a version of PHP that needs a version of a server that nobody rents anymore. Every moving part is a clock counting down to a weekend of migration — and eventually one migration doesn't happen, and eleven years of writing 404s into the fog.

A directory of HTML has no clock, or almost none. Its dependencies are the browser and the filesystem — the two most backward-compatible artifacts in computing. It can move hosts with rsync. It can be archived by anyone with wget, including future me, including the Internet Archive, including a grandchild with a USB stick. Longevity is mostly the art of having fewer dependencies than the things trying to kill you.

The build can be as modern as it likes — this one runs a component framework, a typed content pipeline, and a contrast-checking gate — because the build happens once, on my machine, where complexity is cheap and reversible. What leaves the machine is inert. The reader pays no tax on my tooling: an article here is readable with JavaScript disabled, because the JavaScript is decoration, not load-bearing wall.

There are honest costs — no comments without a third party, search done ahead of time, anything "live" fenced off — and this site accepts every one of them. They are the membership fee of the only club that interests me: sites that will still open.

The mechanism matters. A ranked feed optimises for the marginal second of your attention, which means it optimises for whatever bypasses judgement. A chronological subscription — RSS, a newsletter, a friend's site checked on Sunday — optimises for nothing at all. It just delivers, in order, what someone chose to publish. The choosing is the signal. Everything a ranking adds is, definitionally, noise: it is the difference between what your people said and what a system predicts you'll react to.

(This site ships full-text RSS per section, plus a combined feed — built in the standard-pages phase — precisely because of this post.)

The practical setup is almost insultingly simple. A feed reader with maybe thirty subscriptions, weeded seasonally like a garden. No unread counts — that number is the ranking sneaking back in through the window. Sunday morning, coffee, read what's there, done. Some weeks that's forty minutes; some weeks it's five, because my thirty people had quiet weeks, and a system that can be quiet is precisely the point.

What I lost is real: serendipity at scale, the occasional gem from nowhere. What I got back is a reading life with a shape — authors whose thinking I can watch develop across months, disagreements that stay in context, and the restful knowledge that when there is nothing new, nothing pretends to be.