Side A, Track One
This is the first thing recorded on this tape.
The design is a copy of the November 1984 cover of A.N.A.L.O.G. Computing: cream paper, a cyan grid that runs to a vanishing point, a red masthead, and a robot that floats in the middle of an empty room. I kept the paper, the grid and the red. I replaced the robot with a cassette.
Why a magazine
A blog is a periodical. A periodical has an issue number, a price on the cover, and a list of articles printed over the artwork. Those three things do more for navigation than most modern layouts do, and they cost almost nothing.
The list of posts on the front page is that cover list. Each post gets a track number, a leader of dots, and a date.
What runs it
Astro, one stylesheet, and about a hundred and fifty lines of TypeScript. The pages are static, there is no client framework, and nothing is tracked.
Two fonts do the work:
- Departure Mono for anything in uppercase — the masthead, the headings, the track numbers.
- JetBrains Mono for the body text.
Every vertical measure is a multiple of an 18-pixel line, so the text sits on the grid lines behind it. Images are snapped up to the next line, which is why a 4:3 or 1:1 crop is the safe choice.
The handle
On a wide screen there is a small drag handle in the top-left corner. Pull it, and the column slides across the paper in whole grid cells. The browser remembers where you left it.
That is the whole first track. Turn the tape over when you are ready.
