Gareth Andrew Mackenzie

Author website for Gareth Andrew Mackenzie. The author is the brand; BUILT: How Wealth Is Deliberately Constructed is his current book, not the site's identity.

Live site: https://mackenziebooks.bbroot.com/ (custom domain; GitHub Pages)

Domain

• The CNAME file in the repo root holds the custom domain (mackenziebooks.bbroot.com). Do not delete it: removing it unpublishes the custom domain.
• DNS (at the registrar/DNS host): a CNAME record for mackenziebooks pointing to garethmackenzie.github.io.
• GitHub: Settings > Pages > Custom domain, then tick "Enforce HTTPS" once the certificate is issued.
• With the custom domain set, garethmackenzie.github.io redirects to it.
• Canonical URLs, Open Graph URLs, JSON-LD, sitemap.xml and robots.txt use https://mackenziebooks.bbroot.com/. The scripts in tools/ still hardcode the old garethmackenzie.github.io address; update them before re-running any of them.
• Editing this README does not change the site; pages are built from the HTML files.

Structure

/                 Homepage
/about/           Author bio
/books/           Books index (currently: BUILT)
/built/           BUILT book page
/insights/        Writing index
/insights/<slug>/ Individual essays (10)
/media/           Press kit: bio, cover, portrait, interview topics
/contact/         Contact form + enquiry routing
/privacy/ /terms/ Legal

Navigation order/labels are the same on every page: About, Writing, Books, Media, Contact. There is no BUILT button in the global navigation: BUILT is the current flagship inside Books, so the structure still works when later titles arrive.

Stylesheets

Every page loads dist/site.css first (fonts, layout tokens, header, footer, buttons, consent banner), then one page stylesheet:

Pages	Page stylesheet
/	dist/author-home.css
About, Books, BUILT, Media, Contact, Writing index, Privacy, Terms, 404	dist/pages.css
/insights/<slug>/ (10 essays)	dist/pages.css + insight-article.css

All of these are edited directly. There is no build step for them.

Layout grid. One set of tokens in dist/site.css drives every page: --page-max (1320px content width), --gutter (page margin, 24px on small screens up to 72px), --col-gap, twelve columns, --section-y (section spacing), --measure (40rem reading column) and --header-h. The header, footer and every section align to the same left edge. Two-column pages use one split: a left rail in columns 1-5 and content in columns 6-12. Essays keep the narrower --measure column inside the same 12-column grid.

Fonts. Newsreader (variable, optical size) and Instrument Sans (variable) are self-hosted as trimmed WOFF2 subsets in assets/fonts/ (weights 400-600 and only the characters the site uses; rebuild them with tools/subset_fonts.py), under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (full text in assets/fonts/LICENSE.txt). They are preloaded in every page head. dist/site.css also declares metric-adjusted local fallbacks so headlines keep their line breaks while the web fonts load. GitHub Pages serves static files with Cache-Control: max-age=600, so returning visitors revalidate the font files after ten minutes.

Books catalogue. /books/ is a list of .catalogue-entry items. Each carries data-status. To add a title, add another li.catalogue-entry; when BUILT is no longer the flagship, remove the catalogue-entry--flagship modifier and change its status label to "Published work".

Retired CSS pipeline. The old generated bundles (dist/interior.css, dist/home.css), their source stylesheets and tools/build_css.py were removed. tools/build_cover_images.py regenerates the cover WebP renditions, tools/apply_technical_seo.py, tools/generate_social_cards.py and tools/final_hardening.py still run in the regeneration workflow, and tools/site_qa.py now checks the stylesheet architecture (shared foundation first, one page stylesheet, self-hosted fonts).

Validation

python3 tools/validate_site.py

Checks heading structure, internal links, image alt text, and sitemap coverage. Note: as of this commit it reports one known false positive ("sitemap.xml: expected six GitHub Pages URLs") — a hardcoded check from before the site had a Books page and ten essays; the sitemap itself is correct.

Release documents

• docs/deployment.md: switching GitHub Pages to GitHub Actions, pre-flight evidence, procedure and rollback.
• docs/contact-form.md: replacing the visible recipient address with FormSubmit's random alias (owner action required).
• docs/manual-testing.md: real-device and screen-reader checklist.
• tools/verify_artifact.py: verifies the staged production artifact (also run by the Production Gate).
• tools/build_home_social_card.py: regenerates the author-led homepage social card.

Known state

• The author portrait (assets/gareth-mackenzie-author.jpeg, plus 640/1200 WebP variants) is 1278x872 and must stay that size: the width/height attributes on /, /about/ and /media/ assume it. The JPEG has a 1px grey column on its left edge; on /about/ the image is scaled up 1.2% inside a clipped frame so that column is not visible.
• Analytics consent banner styles live in dist/site.css.
• Verify real typography in a browser after changes: the font files are served from assets/fonts/.