Colophons have existed for literally thousands of years, but not enough websites seem to have them these days. This one does!
Philosophy
This site represents my canon-forge - a personal canonical archive of writing and thinking following these principles:
- Digital Permanence: All content that goes up stays up, with URLs designed to last 50+ years. Maybe I’ll revise after that? I am planning to live until 123, after all.
- Plain Text: All content is authored in plain Markdown for maximum longevity and portability. It is the public subset of my second brain system.
- Self-Replication: I treat the ideas I have less like possessions and more like weather just passing through. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours. I curate and share as I can in the hopes that it may be of service to all. Fly, my pretties! Fly!
- Open Standards: The utmost care has been placed upon adherence to web standards for accessibility and future-proofing. It is designed to make sense for humans and bots alike.
- Simplified Workflow: I’m following a write ⇒ evaluate ⇐> revise ⇐> publish⇒ share flow for sustainable content creation. I authored roughly 1200 posts in the last quarter-century that are finding their way through this process and back onto this site now.
- Human Generated: Unless otherwise stated, all the words in each post are written by me, not AI pretending to be me. Yes, I absolutely do use several AI tools in the care and maintenance of this website, and frankly I wouldn’t have made it this far without them. As I’ve written about here, I’ve been experimenting with generative AI since before the “ChatGPT moment” in November 2022, back when local use was the only option. In 2024, I started incorporating some generated images and video here, and having AI help with some heavy lifting of math and charts. In 2025, I began leveraging AI in the evaluation and revision stages outlined above. But I do the writing around here, and I make the edits manually. Not because it’s easy, because it’s hard. And because that’s how I like it (around here anyway).
- AI-Assisted (Newsletter) Posts: Some posts on this site carry an AI-assisted label in their byline. As described above, this label marks posts where AI tooling assisted in the workflow, or in producing supporting artifacts. Again, posts without the label had no such assistance. Currently the label applies to the Signals & Subtractions newsletter issues republished here. This is the clear communication promised above: where the process changes, the label says so.
Technical Implementation
I built this site using:
- Obsidian as the primary writing and knowledge management environment
- Quartz4 as the static site generator
- Markdown as the universal content format
- Custom scripts for handling the workflow. Claude and ChatGPT really helped a lot with these (as well as dancing between the required Tera, JS, TOML, YAML, XML, & JSON syntaxes)!
Structured Data
This site ships machine-readable metadata so search engines, AI agents, and the indie web can ground who I am and what I publish:
- Schema.org JSON-LD: a linked Person, WebSite, and Organization identity graph site-wide, plus BlogPosting (a flavor of Article) on every post
- Open Graph protocol and Twitter Card tags on every page, with
og:typeset toarticleon posts - A rel=me identity link for IndieWeb verification
Feeds
- RSS 2.0 is the canonical feed. /rss.xml and /atom.xml both redirect to it, so old subscriptions for my fellow diehards keep working (not dead yet)
- JSON Feed 1.1 is served too, cooked up just the way you bots like it!
Privacy and Legal Disclosures
This site uses SSL/TLS encryption and follows Privacy by Design principals. The Privacy Statement for this website is maintained here: https://sam-rogers.com/privacy
License and Attribution
All content is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 which allows non-commercial sharing with attribution and similar licensing of derivative works.
So you can share my stuff as mine, but no you can’t try to pass it off as yours. And please don’t go selling what I’m giving away for free here, alright? Unless you wanna cut me in on a slice, then maybe. But you should probably just go to my business page and grab some consulting hours because that’ll be faster and cheaper for you.
Similar Projects
If you’re interested in digital gardens, personal knowledge bases, or canonical archives, you might enjoy these related projects:
I’m hoping to gather more such references. Got some? Lemme know.
Connect and Discuss
If you’re working on a similar project yourself or have thoughts about this approach, I’d love to hear from you.