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GlossEssay blog

An essay blog whose footnotes are written by hand in the margin.

v1.1.0since 2026

Gloss's home page: the opening line Essays on slow software and the tools that outlast us with its last words highlighted, a handwritten line under it, six essays as ruled rows with dates and reading times, and a handwritten new here? start with beside a circled title.Gloss's home page: the opening line Essays on slow software and the tools that outlast us with its last words highlighted, a handwritten line under it, six essays as ruled rows with dates and reading times, and a handwritten new here? start with beside a circled title.
An essay under two headings with footnote numbers in the text; in the margin beside them, note 1 in blue handwriting and note 2, a longer one, in small italic print.
The essay The bad first page: an italic standfirst, the words allowed to be bad circled in pencil, a handwritten in this essay contents list in the margin, and a handwritten margin note further down.
The reading log in dark mode: books grouped by year with the month, title in bold italic and author, and a handwritten line under each, two with an I wrote about it link.

Editions

Personal and Team include every release within the major version you buy. Refunds within 14 days, no questions asked.

Gloss is an Astro theme for a personal blog of long essays. The text is set in a book face at a comfortable measure, and to its right is a wide margin where your footnotes appear in handwriting, beside the paragraph they belong to. On a phone each note sits under its paragraph with a pencil rule; long notes switch to small print. Write footnotes the usual Markdown way and the build does the rest.

How it reads

  • Gelasio for the text, Caveat for the handwriting, Geist for dates and the interface
  • Footnotes become margin notes, numbered in reading order; a note longer than a few lines is set in small italic print instead of handwriting
  • ==highlight== and ++underline++ add a highlighter stroke and a pencil underline
  • One pencil colour, one highlighter, no cards or shadows
  • Dark mode, contrast checked against WCAG AA, a layout that holds at 360px

In the free edition

  • Home, post, archive, about and 404 pages
  • Margin notes and the two hand marks in Markdown
  • Pictures in posts resized at build time, with plain-Markdown captions
  • Quotes with an attribution line, and task lists ticked by hand
  • An RSS feed and one default share image

What Pro adds

  • MDX hand marks: a circle, a strike-through, a caret with a word written in above the line, a pencil bracket down a passage and an unnumbered margin note, and a circled start-here post on the home page
  • Contents in the margin for long essays, series with “you are here”, and topic pages
  • Pagefind search over every essay, margin notes included
  • A reading log: the books you finished, one handwritten line each
  • A Buttondown subscribe form and Giscus comments
  • A share card drawn for every post, with its handwritten note
  • Three colour presets and a second font pairing

Under the hood

  • Astro, Tailwind CSS v4, static output; the only client-side JavaScript is the theme toggle, the note spacing and search
  • Lighthouse 95+ on mobile, checked in CI, and an AGENTS.md map for AI coding tools