I like the simplicity of Jekyll and appreciate it’s Ruby roots. While it’s sometimes a pain in with it’s opinions, I haven’t found a compelling reason to leave it and find that I am able to work around issues most of the time. I make use of categories and data files to power my projects, photography galleries and blogroll.
I write all my posts in markdown within (neo)vim, without ceramony. Sometimes they live as drafts in my Obsidian notes before being copy and pasted into a file.
I’ve got a small script that processes images through imagemagick and dumps them into an S3 bucket that’s configured as a CDN so that larger files are not included in the GitHub pages release.
Previous iterations of this site used system fonts, but I’ve recently switched over to using Scientifica for page headers and small accents, Caveat for more accents, and IBM Plex for everything else. I also use IBM Plex in the PDF version of my resume.
Icons around the site come from the Lucid icon project. In the PDF version of my resume I also use Feather icons (which Lucid is a fork of).
My aside annotations/footnotessuch as this one feature is based on an article I read a long time ago and unfortunately I’ve lost the original source. I believe it was a regional radio news station’s site, and was a long form essay on someones life. If you know the source, please email me so I can give proper attribution here!
This started life as a basic Liquid tag and was one of my first forays into Jekyll plugins. Originally you’d define an annotation like so:
{% aside red this would be the annotations 'title' %}and this would be the text
that expands out when the title is clicked on%{ endaside %}
Which, as you can imagine, made for a painful authoring experience. These days
I’ve borrowed a combo of features from Kramdown in the way of footnotes and
Span IALs and Obsidian and their ==highlighted== syntax to munge a “markdown
native” version together that uses highlights and footnotes. I’ve got two
additional Jekyll plugins to support this, one that adds the highlight syntax
to Kramdown and one that converts marked footnotes into annotations.
These days I can write like this to get the same output in HTML:
==🔴this annotation is red[^demo-1]== and ==i can also pick a custom color[^demo-2]=={:.-orange.squared} via Kramdown span level IALs
[^demo-1]: and functions nicer with having small markdown and pulling the
injection out into a separate block
[^demo-2]: which are also pretty neat.
I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from around the web for design and content. While I can’t remember every influencial piece, these are the ones that actively stand out to me.
This colophon is inspired by Maggie Appleton’s, Gwern’s and Jarema’s, among others.
My blogroll format, with the site and feed links, and OPML download is my own recreation of one by Ed Leeman’s.
My LLM/”AI” Policy is inspired by David Bushell’s policy, and Edward Loveall’s article You Are Allowed To Reject LLMs.
The “Tags” and “Posts by Tags” feature of my blog archive is directly inspired by my friend Robert Carpenter’s own tags page.