Chris Gibbons

How the sausage is made

Colophon

The nuts and bolts of the site.

I built this site for me, if it impresses anyone along the way then that’s a bonus.

The stack

Built with Eleventy: a static site generator that gets out of your way and lets you write HTML like you mean it. No client-side JavaScript framework.

Styles are vanilla CSS, structured around cascade layers and design tokens. No preprocessor, no utility framework. That’s on purpose: if you can’t do it in CSS, it probably doesn’t need doing.

The typefaces are Atkinson Hyperlegible Next for headings and body text, and Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono for code and labels. Self-hosted, so no third party sees your visit.

Hosted on Netlify. Source on GitHub.

There are no cookies, no tracking, and no ads. Ever.

The design

The visual design is mine. It went through several iterations before settling into something I’m happy with, which mostly means something I’ll still be happy with in two years.

Colour palette is earthy and warm. Light mode is the default; dark mode is one click away and persists across sessions.

Neutral

Stone

Pages, surfaces and text.

Light mode

Heather

Links, buttons, colour bands and the footer.

Dark mode

Moss

The same jobs as heather, after dark.

Design tokens as CSS Design tokens as JSON

The writing

Everything here is written by me, in my own voice. Some of it takes a long time. Some of it is short and unfinished. I’m neurodivergent, and I use AI cautiously, as a second pair of eyes.

The name

gbbns.co is my surname, abbreviated. It’s what happens when you’ve been using the internet long enough to find all the good domains gone.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the baseline here. The site uses semantic HTML, a proper heading hierarchy and enough colour contrast, and all of it works from a keyboard. If you find something that doesn’t work for you, I want to know: get in touch.

Version history

Six versions so far. Each one did its job.

Credits

The contour drawings of Bowfell and Derwentwater are derived from EU-DEM v1.1, produced by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service. Smoothed, simplified, and not for navigation.