Thylacine

Colophon

2 min read

This site is Zola — a static site generator that is a single Rust binary with no runtime, no plugin ecosystem and no dependency tree. There is nothing to install, nothing to keep patched, and a checkout in five years still builds. For a site whose entire job is to serve a few articles about an operating system, that is the correct amount of machinery.

It is served from Cloudflare, built from a pinned Zola binary that the build script downloads itself rather than one the platform provides.

The palette is not a stylistic choice

The colours are Bonfire, and they are not chosen to suit a website. They are transcribed from docs/UTOPIA-VISUAL.md in the Thylacine tree, where they are committed scripture governing the shell, the editor and the terminal configuration the system ships.

The background is #0e0c0c: near-black with a barely perceptible red cast — the way darkness looks when a fire a few hundred metres away cannot illuminate anything and only shifts the colour temperature of the air. The prompt glyph in #e07840 belongs to that air rather than contrasting against it.

The syntax highlighting matters more than it looks. Zola 0.22 replaced its highlighter with giallo, which consumes VSCode-format themes, so the seven Bonfire syntax hues are a theme file rather than an approximation in CSS:

RoleHexUsed for
slate#8a9ac8keywords, control flow, storage
sage#8ab8a8types, structs, imports
sand#c8a882members, attributes, fields
moss#b8d098constants, macros, enum variants
ash#b07060function names, identifiers
dusk#a898c8string literals
smoke#7a8a7acomments

A code block on this page is therefore rendered in the same values as the same code in the system’s own editor. Not similar values — the same ones, checked at build time out of one file.

What is deliberately absent

No webfonts, no analytics, no third-party requests of any kind. The recommended Utopia typeface is PragmataPro, which is commercial and not bundled, so the stylesheet asks for it and falls through to a system monospace for everyone who does not own it. Nothing here phones home, and the page works with JavaScript disabled because there is none.