Colophon — How TechFuel HQ Is Built

What this page is

A public record of how this site gets built — the publishing stack, the sourcing approach, and the editorial rules every article has to clear before it ships. The short version is on the About page. This is the long version with names, versions, and rules written out.

Publishing stack

TechFuel HQ is a static site built with Hugo extended (v0.145.0) and deployed to GitHub Pages from the main branch via GitHub Actions.

  • Hosting: GitHub Pages
  • Build: Hugo extended (v0.145.0), --gc --minify on every deploy
  • Source control: GitHub. Changes land on main — some through a pull request, most pushed directly — and every push runs an automated ship gate (build, link check, and SEO//disclosure checks) that has to pass before the site deploys
  • CDN / DNS: Cloudflare in front of GitHub Pages (migrated 2026-06-20)
  • Analytics: Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
  • Search: Google Search Console for indexing state
  • Domain: techfuelhq.com, registered to the site author

Layouts and styles are written from scratch. No third-party theme.

How hardware figures are sourced

Hardware recommendations published in 2024–2025 were tested on a bench in St. Louis County, Missouri, using a P3 P4400 Kill A Watt for at-the-wall power, iperf3 for network throughput, fio for storage IOPS, and PresentMon for GPU frame-time capture. GPUs benchmarked on that bench — and used as the first-party baselines in the RTX 5080 dataset — included the RTX 4080, RTX 4080 Super, and an RTX 5080 Founders Edition. That homelab gear was largely sold or retired in early 2026; the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5080 OC remains on the current bench.

Content published or updated from June 2026 onward sources its benchmarks from named third-party publications and primary documentation rather than a current personal bench:

Every figure is attributed to its source inline. Vendor spec-sheet numbers are labeled separately from independent third-party measurements.

AI in the workflow

AI tools assist with research aggregation, outlining, and first drafts — gathering sources to read, structuring an outline, and producing a rough draft to edit down. They do not decide what gets recommended, and they do not generate the measured figures: every benchmark, price, and spec still traces to a cited source or labeled first-party data under the standards below. Editorial judgment, verification, and the final wording are the author’s, and the byline is human and accountable.

Editorial standards

Every article on this site has to clear all of these before it ships:

  1. No sponsored articles, no vendor samples, no paid placement. A recommendation is never shaped by anything other than the merits of the product.
  2. Methodology and sources block on every article. Every benchmark-based article includes a “Methodology and sources” section naming the third-party publications and primary documentation the figures are drawn from.
  3. Last-verified date on every article. When the underlying facts change, the article gets updated and the last-verified date moves. When they don’t, it doesn’t.
  4. Cited benchmarks or no benchmarks. Vendor spec-sheet numbers are labeled separately from independent third-party measurements. Made-up benchmarks are worse than no benchmarks; any figure that cannot be attributed to a named source is removed rather than estimated.
  5. No paid placement, ever. No product appears because a vendor paid, gifted, or sponsored it; placement is editorial only.
  6. Cite primary sources inline. Vendor docs, official changelogs, and reputable trade press get linked. Reddit and forum threads get linked when they are the primary signal but get labeled as community-reported, not as vendor-confirmed.
  7. No fabricated first-party claims. Present-tense first-person measurement claims (“I measured…”, “on my own bench…”) are used only when backed by a real, current artifact. Where no such artifact exists, figures are sourced to named third parties and the prose says so. Past-tense references to gear genuinely owned in 2024–2025 are allowed and labeled as past.

Where the policy pages live

This page is the toolchain-and-history record. The rules themselves each live in exactly one place, so they cannot drift apart:

  • Source standards — what counts as a citable source and when forum posts qualify: methodology.
  • Money — which links earn a commission and why that never changes a pick: the disclosure page, summarized in methodology. No paid placement, ever.
  • Corrections — how errors get fixed and logged: methodology.

Contact

Spot something wrong, want to challenge a recommendation, or have a question about how a specific article was produced? Email hello@techfuelhq.com.

Last updated: 2026-08-14.