Colophon — a note on the making

This site, from 2000 to now.

A colophon is the note at the back of a book that says how the book was made — the type, the paper, the press. This site is a book of sorts, and it has earned one. A site about conclusions ought to end deliberately.

2000 A person, documented like software

The site began in the year 2000 with a small joke that turned out to be a lasting idea: a home page written as a README file, the plain-text document that tells you what a piece of software is and how to use it. Six chapters — Who, What, When, Where, How, and a Picture Project — and a copyright line that has been running ever since. It has called itself version 4.0 from the very beginning; some numbers you keep because they were right the first time.

Everything was made by hand then: a text editor, HTML files on a desktop computer, and an FTP program to carry them to the server. That arrangement has never changed, and this edition keeps it.

The teaching Making conclusions, on purpose

The heart of the site is a method learned from Keith Tandy, an inspiring and demanding professor of literature whose influence set my instructional agenda for two decades of teaching: every course, whatever its title, was about making acceptable conclusions. Find the things. Group them. Identify what makes each group similar. Conclude what is similar about all of the groups.

In the mid-2000s the method became an interactive e-learning module built with Macromedia Flash — twenty-five screens of typing, sorting, and concluding, with forty-eight colored shapes, a deck of playing cards, and the contents of a little boy's bedroom. A companion piece, Tell Me About It, gathered two hundred and twelve questions for making good conclusions about other people, one question per page.

The work What the portfolio holds

The What chapter collects the working years: technical writing for software companies — administrator's guides, help systems, test scripts, templates — three graphic booklets (LUCID, GUARDIANS, RE-ORG), before-and-after document makeovers, computer learning centers built for EAH, and handbooks and reading posters from the English department at San Domenico. The Picture Project turns the same four-step method on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs, treating every picture as a question waiting for a well-made conclusion.

2020 The silence

On the last day of 2020, Adobe ended Flash, and the browsers followed. The text of the module kept working — text is patient — but the exercises went dark, and the little boy's bedroom stayed unsorted for five years.

2026 The rebuild

This edition recovers all of it. The original Flash files were opened and read — every food list, shape, card, and question extracted from the files themselves — and the module was rebuilt screen for screen in plain HTML5: no plug-in, no database, no build tools. The two hundred and twelve questions now live on one page instead of two hundred and twelve. The README came home as the front door, and the colophon you are reading is the last page.

The rebuild was made in conversation with an Emergent AI assistant, one screen at a time, from the recovered originals — a new kind of press producing old-fashioned pages: files a person can read, edit on a desktop, and upload by hand.

The making Type, paper, ink

The typefaces are Lora (for the voice), Instrument Sans (for the apparatus), and JetBrains Mono (for the README that started it all). The paper is vellum, the ink is near-black, the accent is terracotta. Nothing here requires a login, a plug-in, or a server beyond the one that hands you the file.