Colophon

What the stages mean

A date says when something was written and not how finished it is, so every post carries a stage as well.

seedling

just started, will change.

planted

had a proper pass.

tended

kept up to date.

What it is built with

• Next.js and React, written in TypeScript.
• Tailwind for the layout, with the type scale and the palette as CSS custom properties.
• Supabase for the database, the files and the sign-in. Everything the public can read is decided by row-level security rather than by a filter in a query, which is the difference between a rule and a habit.
• Vercel for the hosting.

How it is drawn

The plants and the birds are SVG, written rather than scanned, in an engraved register: tone is built from hatching at varying weight and spacing, not from fills. Every one of them is drawn from a seeded generator, so the server and the browser produce the same marks and nothing shifts on load. Each is meant to be replaced by a scan of Bella’s own drawing.

Two faces

Headings, labels and buttons are set in the system sans at bold. Body text, quotes and captions are set in Times. There is no third face and there is no font file to download, which is why pages arrive without a flash of the wrong type.

Getting in touch

There is a question box at the foot of the homepage. Questions are read privately and never shown on the site; some get answered in Notes, without saying who asked.

Posts can take comments. Nothing appears until Bella has read it, there is no account to make, and an email address is optional and never shown to anyone. Some posts have them turned off, and a post with no comment box has had them closed rather than lost.

Everything published here is in the feed and listed in the archive.