Colophon: The Inner Workings of This Blog

TL;DR

BurgeonLab is a static site built with Hugo, hosted on Bunny.net¹ Edge Storage with BunnyCDN, and uses a heavily modded version of the Anubis2 theme. It is built and deployed using SourceHut Builds. No cookies are used. GoatCounter provides basic, privacy-first web analytics. Jump to details.

What This Page Is About

Only recently did I realize there’s a term that meant “the inner workings / how this site was built”! I was in the process of writing a blog post about the technologies and tools used to build this blog; but now I can actually use the proper term and make it a dedicated page.

Colophon (noun): an inscription at the end of a book or manuscript usually with facts about its production.

Definition from Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.

Changelog

I think it might be cool to see the changes as this blog grows, so I’ve added a separate /⁠changelog page.

About This Site

Function	Tool
Generator	Hugo
Hugo Theme	Anubis2, with many custom mods
Commenting	Integrated with Mastodon (modified code from Carl Schwan)
Search Function	Pagefind
Hosting	Bunny.net Storage1
Deployment	Git & SourceHut Builds CI2
Source Code	SourceHut Git Repo
Web Analytics	GoatCounter
Static Form	Formspark with Botpoison
IDE	VSCodium
IDE Extensions	Even Better TOML, Markdownlint, Markdown-link-expander, LanguageTool Linter, Code Spell Checker, Git History, Hugo Utilities, Prettier, YAML
Optimizations	webp conversion, Watermarking, Seobility, Normalize.css, DOMPurify, SVGO3
Referrer Policy	strict-origin-when-cross-origin4
Colour Theme	Blog theme (dark mode) inspired by Rainglow (Rebellion Contrast), syntax highlighter set to gruvbox
Typeface	Hosted locally: Kode Mono & Nokora
Icons	Font Awesome, Tabler, Simple Icons
Badges	My blog badge is created by joelchrono. 88x31px Button Generator, DIY with GIMP, Shields.io
Open Graph Images	Default OG:image made with GIMP, OG Image Maker, D2lang diagrams

Web Analytics

Online privacy is an important thing for everyone using the Internet. It’s something I care about deeply—so I made sure to use, to the best of my knowledge, the most privacy-friendly / open source technologies on this website.

I use GoatCounter to collect basic analytics about visitors to my site. It is a privacy-friendly and open source analytics platform (alternative to Google Analytics) that does not collect personally identifiable information. It doesn’t track users with unique identifiers and no information is shared with third parties. It collects anonymous data such as:

• Hashed IP addresses (which cannot be reversed to identify individuals)
• Browser User-Agent string
• Screen size
• Referrer and URL visited
• Country/location data (generalized)

This data helps me understand how many people visit my site and where the top referrers are coming from, so I can improve your experience. GoatCounter does not require cookie consent under GDPR because it does not track personal data. To view BurgeonLab’s web analytics data, visit the /⁠stats page.

Personal Data

If you contact me by email or using the contact form, I only collect your email address and the message you send so I can reply. I will not share or sell your information to third parties. The same goes for other platforms like Signal, etc. If you’d like your information deleted or have any other questions, please get in touch.

GenAI Usage

AI tools are used for the following:

• With offline models on Ollama
  • Troubleshooting technical, web development issues; or when I get stuck with Hugo’s backend (e.g. customizing layout, partials, shortcodes, Go logic).
  • Sometimes to summarize posts for a draft meta description (max. 160 characters).
• With LanguageTool in VSCodium in local server mode via Extension-Managed Service
  • Light proofreading⁵ (i.e. grammar, spelling, flow, sentence structure)

While these tools help improve the quality of my writing and bring my point across to you more effectively; rest assured that all content and opinions are based my own experience and reflections, and will never be generated by AI.

Birth of BurgeonLab

It’s 2022 and I was fed up after using WordPress for a year with my first blog. After re-educating myself about content management systems (CMS), I decided static site generators (SSG) is the way to go. Out of the ones I’ve shortlisted—Jekyll, Eleventy (11ty), Hugo, and Pelican—I chose Hugo, and I am so pleased with my decision. With that, my Hugo journey began and this site was born. I have so much fun with Hugo, learning while doing, and writing content in Markdown, locally/offline in VSCodium is just a joy compared to the clunky web-based WordPress editor.

Site Status Updates

As of 2026/01

Slowly, but surely, BurgeonLab is becoming a website that uses IndieWeb building blocks. It’s been a dream of mine to own a tiny piece of Internet that doesn’t rely on Big Tech or requires the use of a “noisy” social media app, is 100% customized to my liking (with the help of the infinite capabilities of Hugo), and is interconnected with other users. In this day and age, where I find myself mentally responding to every image or video I see with “this is probably AI-generated content”, I value human-made content even more.

I’ve been testing out Indiekit as the backend for Micropub content, but I’m still tweaking it to get it right for my setup. Looking forward to implementing it fully soon in Q1 2026. If you’re reading this and you don’t have your own website—I highly recommend you to get started and join the IndieWeb movement!

As of 2025/06

I originally created this site for tech-related topics that I am passionate or learning about; sharing relevant technical notes for others who are interested, acting as a personal logbook for all things technology in my life. But three years in, I have a feeling it could possibly be more than just tech.

I plan to evolve it to be something more wide-ranging, perhaps with more personal, non-geeky content in the future. I am currently in the process of “upgrading” my site with additional content (like this /colophon), improving accessibility, so expect to see some changes!