Astro on Cloudflare
Astro keeps the editorial pages close to plain HTML and Markdown. Cloudflare handles the Worker, static assets, D1, KV, and the scheduled Bay Area Radar digest. That combination lets one site hold quiet field notes and working data products without forcing either into the other's shape.
Eleven zones
The neutral palette is an eleven-step tonal scale borrowed from the photographic Zone System. It started on paper: zone 0 pure black, zone X the page, zone V the middle gray reference. The August rebuild took the site to night and the scale came with it. The numbering still counts distance from the page you are reading on, so at night zone X is the ground and zone 0 is the brightest snow. The single interface accent moved from alpenglow red to the gold that lands on granite after sunset, because the red loses too much contrast against a dark ground.
- Zone 0
--zone-0 - Zone I
--zone-i - Zone II
--zone-ii - Zone III
--zone-iii - Zone IV
--zone-iv - Zone V
--zone-v - Zone VI
--zone-vi - Zone VII
--zone-vii - Zone VIII
--zone-viii - Zone IX
--zone-ix - Zone X
--zone-x
The reference point is the National Archives' Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, including the unfinished 1941 to 1942 Mural Project.
Type and photographs
Space Grotesk carries the interface, the headings, and most body copy. IBM Plex Mono is reserved for eyebrows, dates, captions, and plate labels. Newsreader supplies the editorial voice: the hero tagline, the answers the search returns, and section blurbs. The pages that stayed on paper, like the World Cup dashboard and the states drill, still run Newsreader with Archivo and JetBrains Mono.
Every photograph on the site is mine, and all of them run in full color, the way the places actually looked. Product screenshots stay in color too, because they are evidence, not memories. Photos are served through an on-demand transform endpoint that resizes to the viewport and prefers WebP.
The search at the top
The homepage hero is a search bar that answers questions about me in my own voice. It runs a language model on Cloudflare Workers AI, grounded in a single public knowledge file that lives in the repository. The model call happens in a Worker, never in the browser, so there is no key to leak and the full prompt never ships to a visitor. Questions are rate limited per address, nothing a visitor types is stored, and each answer replaces the last one.
It will get things wrong. When it does not know something it is told to say so and point at my email, which is the honest failure mode for a page that claims to be a second brain.
Privacy
The public portfolio pages do not load a third-party analytics script. Cloudflare provides the infrastructure and its configured observability. The World Cup and Radar owner gates use signed session cookies.
Bay Area Radar stores the email address and preferences a subscriber submits, uses Cloudflare Turnstile on its forms, and sends the digest through Resend. DeDuper's photo analysis stays on device.
AI assistance
AI tools assisted with code, design exploration, testing, and copy editing. I am responsible for the published facts, trip notes, and final edits.
Change log
: rebuilt the homepage around the second-brain search, moved the site to a dark palette carried by my own mountain photography, and structured the page as a trail with waypoints.
: rebuilt the site around the Zone System, replaced ambient effects with editorial structure, deepened the trip archive, and added this set of working notes.