My Blog Principles

Accessibility #

• Posts should be easily readable even to the silly people like me.
• Shorter is better.
• More (shorter) sections are better for reading.
• Color contrast between background and foreground, and between these and accent color—should be decent, close to WCAG AA (4.5 ratio.)
• Colors should be minimal and soft.
• Large font (font-size: large;) by default.
• Everything should be dark mode (prefers-color-scheme: dark) friendly. Including the pictures, made in two versions—light and dark.
• But dark mode should be togglable for those with arbitrary system settings. I’ve only implemented it recently.
• Emphasis and other text-level elements should be avoided. Because they don’t bear much meaning and are too noisy.
• HTML should be semantic and stick to built-in elements unless absolutely necessary.
• Most posts should be readable in all supported formats: HTML, .txt, Manpage, and LaTeX.
  • Exception: highly interactive pages / with forms. Like this Kaktovik numerals post. Or my HTML-only CV (go hire me!).
• Semantic linebreaks in source for easier editing and reading.
• Sentences—or clauses, rather—should have less than 80 chars in them, because longer sentences are harder to read.

Cultural / Linguistic #

• No “AI” for post polishing and writing. I want to stay human.
• Do projects and writing in public, unless otherwise necessary. This website build and content is fully public on Codeberg. So you can easily snoop on my activities and preview drafts there.
• Use an open license (Creative Commons as of April 2026) for the content.
• they/them as the “default” pronouns.
• English is the preferred language, followed by Interslavic, and only then by Russian. So far, I only have one post in Interslavic and ~80 in English. Based on this trend, you’re unlikely to see Russian posts in the next couple of years.
  • Because Russian is an imperial language forced onto many people to this day.
    • English is imperial too, but it’s slightly more neutral
  • Also because of accessibility to the widest possible audience.
• Use smart curly quotes and apostrophes for English and angle quotes for Slavic languages.
• Use classic punctuation (punctuation is put before quotes and parentheses!) for English and logical punctuation for Slavic languages.
• Make link text a good indicator of where it leads.

Technical #

• Designed To Last.
• Hypertext first.
• No Markdown. Only Pidgin HTML.
• JavaScript should only be used when direly necessary. If it’s used, it should only progressively enhance the page.
  • My code should never block one from engaging with the post with JS off.
• CSS should be minimal and Widely Available as per Baseline.
  • In case it’s not Baseline, it should only be used when progressively enhancing the page.
• Gracefully degrade if both of the previous points fail.
• The site should be reasonably static and all the generation load should be offloaded to a machine I own and not to the user.
  • Right now, it’s all built on my laptop with ed(1).
• The tech used in building the site should be standard, portable, and non-vendor-locked. Which means: HTML, CSS, vanilla JS (no frameworks,) Lisp, C, and ed(1)
• There’s preferably no machine I manage in site deployment. As per Digital Bum manifesto. Right now, it’s all Codeberg Pages.
• Size of the page and assets should be ruthlessly optimized for those on slow connection.
  • Images are generated as lazy by default.
  • And compressed as much as possible.
• No analytics.
• No CDNs—all content is shipped with the site. Safer and more reliable this way.

Leave feedback! (via email) #