The word
A colophon is the little note at the end of a book that tells you how it was made: who set the type, on what press, in which face. Printers have been tucking them into back pages for five centuries, a quiet way of saying the making mattered.
This colophon borrows the idea for your blog. It's the machinery that turns your words into something well made, and then keeps out of the way.
The belief
The words are yours, and they should stay that way. A colophon site is an ordinary git repository full of plain text. Posts are Markdown files you can open in any editor, and even the odds and ends (the record of what's been syndicated where, any artwork you've had generated) sit beside them as files. There's no database to dump and no export button to hunt for, because nothing was trapped to begin with. If you deleted colophon tomorrow, you'd still have every word you ever wrote.
The open web gets the same respect. Your site publishes proper feeds, speaks microformats2, sends and receives webmentions, and syndicates the POSSE way: the real post lives on your domain, and the copies elsewhere point back to it. Platforms rise and fall on their own schedule. Your address doesn't have to.
And accessibility isn't a box ticked at the end. colophon's output aims for WCAG 2.2 AAA throughout, and every page is built to work before JavaScript turns up, if it turns up at all.
The deal
colophon is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There's no paid tier and no hosted service. The app does have its own anonymous usage ping, but it's documented, it never sees your content, and one setting turns it off.
It's made by John Mylchreest, and this site is built with it. Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.