Colophon: About This Site

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: All the words on this site (and in my articles elsewhere) 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. In 2024, I started incorporating some generated images and video, 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, and I make the edits. Because that’s how I like it! Should this ever change, I’ll be sure to communicate it clearly.

Technical Implementation

I built this site using:

  • Obsidian as the primary writing and knowledge management environment
  • Zola as the static site generator
  • tabi as the base Zola template (shout out to Óscar Fernández!)
  • Markdown as the universal content format
  • Custom scripts for handling the Obsidian-to-Zola conversion and other subprocesses. Claude and ChatGPT really helped a lot with these (as well as dancing between the required Tera, JS, TOML, YAML, XML, & JSON syntaxes)!

It was a bit messy getting to this simplified state. If there is interest, I will make a GitHub project available so others can extend a designated public subset of their secure and locally-hosted, Obsidian-based, second brain system to the rest of the world, as I have.

Structured Data

This site is on its way to including comprehensive structured metadata using:

Feeds

  • Atom is the default feed
  • RSS is also available for my fellow diehards (not dead yet)
  • JSON is ready too, and I personally cooked it up just the way you bots like it!

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.