About This Site

I wrote up the process and theory behind this website, but basically it’s an export and reformatting of my highlights and notes of my online (and some offline) reading (script here).

I use it to jostle loose ideas when I’m researching a particular problem in software design or writing topic. I usually either ask it for a random note or search by keyword.

Features

Posts and pages and notes can link to each other, and backlinks are shown when present. This allows for two-way linking of ideas.

Search (on the homepage and on a dedicated page) allows you to find anything without having to use an external search engine.

Pages and posts support table-of-contents rendering, metadata about citation/sourcing, Readwise integration, h-card markup (for webmention support), and more.

Infrastructure

The site theme was originally forked from Simply Jekyll and has slowly been rewritten and refactored over time.

This site’s source code lives on Github and is served using GitHub Pages.

This website is statically generated using Jekyll from a set of Markdown files.

Search is powered by lunrjs. Photo galleries and zoom are powered by PhotoSwipe. The site fonts are IBM Plex. Network graph views are powered by vis-network. Popularity is tracked by Goatcounter - public stats are available at /analytics. Comments are powered by Cusdis. Serverless scripts (e.g. for generating insights) are hosted/run by Val Town.

You can read about everything else I use to build things at /uses.

Stats

• Site version: v2.8.0-r9-g33224fd
• Build time: 2024-12-02T17:47:14+00:00
• Posts count: 1476
• Tags count: 239
• First post date: March 14, 2011

Changelog

Unreleased

• /projects page
• podcast rendering
• Add link facets to Bluesky syndication
• import posts from Mastodon as notes
• import posts from Bluesky as notes/replies
• photos page
• Figure out someway to connect book summary posts and article summary post to highlights and override the default source page
• Create mastodon or Bluesky bots to have LLMs interact with my posts
• Refactor insights logic to operate via LLM tools instead of plain RAG
• More ideas

2024-12-01

• Switch to monospace fonts
• POSSE notes to Mastodon and Bluesky
• import posts from Mastodon as replies
• replies page
• insights inline on the post page itself
• backlinks powered by the same data that provides the network linkages
• ReplyTo as extractable content and used to link

2024-11-24

• Redesign the homepage to be more like a directory

2024-09-07

• Add conversation support to insight page

2024-09-06

• Add insight generation for posts and tags

2024-07-16

• Add lazy-loading support for images in post lists

2024-07-13

• Switch search library from Lunr.js to Fuse.js

2024-07-04

• Add Insight page

2024-06-22

• Switching off Tinylitics and over to Goatcounter for analytics

2024-06-16

• Post to mastodon via GitHub action build pipeline (POSSE)
• Add comments via Cusdis
• Add a guestbook page

2024-06-01

• Added Tinylitics as an experiment

2024-05-27

• Render search results statically

2024-05-26

• Add “post via GitHub issue” feature

2024-03-02

• Display “recently read” and “reading inbox” articles from Reader API

2024-02-28

• /uses page (ref)
• podroll and blogroll posts/tags

2024-02-19

• Network/map display of all posts (to find edges of the garden needing weeding)
• Network display on each post (to walk the garden path)
• Walking path display on the network (based on session)

2024-02-17

• Print and PDF styling of posts

2024-02-03

• Enabled PWA offline capabilities

2024-02-01

• Add “Feeling Lucky” mode to the search page.

2024-01-24

• optimize images for web sizes/rendering

2024-01-15

• Redesign the site to double-column layout
• Add notepad to posts and pages
• Introduced seasons

2024-01-06

• Featured image support on posts
• Migrate the blog content from Ghost into this site
  • Create a category page for the blog
  • create a category for books
  • create a category for concerts
  • create a category for movies
  • create a category for desks
  • create a category for talks
  • /subscribe page
  • /narro page
  • /contact page

2023-12-29

• Photo gallery and zoom support
• Linking books via Amazon ASIN (though we hate Amazon, it’s all we can get from Readwise’s API)

2023-12-27

• New theme implemented (major simplification)
• Update link styling to suppprt visited state

2023-06-22

• Implemented decimal index

2023-06-09

• Printable styling and QRCodes

2023-05-01

• Highlight text fragments in outbound links

2023-03-05

• Send Webmentions with GitHub Actions

2023-03-04

• Switch to GitHub Actions for build

2023-03-01

• Add Webmention display support

2023-02-16

• Styled with Tufte.css

2023-02-11

• Added Random Note page

2023-02-11

• Search-via-URL-query support

2023-01-11

• Tags added to search results

2023-02-09

• Forked from Original Theme