Colophon

How this site is put together

This site goes back to around 2000, when it ran on a content manager I wrote myself in Perl. Over the years I tried another blogging system or two (which is where some of the old recipe photos went missing) before settling on WordPress around 2012(ish). In 2024 I moved it to Jekyll, a static site generator. Now I write everything as plain text files, Jekyll turns them into web pages, and the server just hands those pages out. There’s no database or admin login behind it, which makes the site faster, simpler, safer, and much less work to keep running.

The writing

Everything you read here (the homilies, bulletin articles, Catholic Advance columns, recipes, and everything else) was written by me. When I’ve quoted someone else, I’ve tried to say so.

The one exception is this page. It’s the only one I let Claude write (apart from a few one-line descriptions of the site’s sections), which I think is kind of funny.

The technical side

In 2026 I gave the site an overhaul with help from Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Claude did most of the technical work: the majorly refreshed design, the page templates, cleaning up the old posts (they’d come over from WordPress years ago, but they were a mess), bringing over a year’s worth of articles from my files, the email newsletter, and the tools I use to publish. It also suggested titles and tags for many of the newer posts, which I reviewed. It didn’t write my homilies or articles. Those are still mine, typos and all.

The details

  • Type: headings in Freight Display, labels in Neue Kabel, and the occasional drop cap in Carol Gothic, all from Adobe Fonts. Body text is in Source Serif 4.
  • Email: new posts go out through Buttondown.
  • Podcast: the homily podcast is an ordinary podcast feed, available in most podcast apps.
  • Readings: the readings listed under homilies and columns come from Felix Just’s tables of the Lectionary at catholic-resources.org, matched to the right Sunday with the Liturgical Calendar API. Readings for the 1962 Missal come from Missale Meum. The links go to the USCCB to read them in full.
  • Photos: most of the photos on the site are mine, including the night sky at the top of the home page. Paintings and other artwork usually come from Wikimedia Commons.

If something on the site is broken, please let me know.