About This Site

This site is my way of working in the open - a public repository of my knowledge, research, and writing that serves both as a personal memory aid and a resource I share with others.

Notes

My primary knowledge collection, imported from Readwise/Reader highlights of online content and physical book reading, plus manual notes from conversations with peers. I use these as supporting research for my writing and as a memory aid for my work.

Blog

All of my original writing, including essays, personal life stories, travel writing, and reviews of concerts, movies, and music.

Exercise

My exercise log from recent years, which I use to reflect on my health and explore my environment.

Replies

Cross-posted replies I make on social networks and other external sites, archived here for completeness and reference.

Pages

Various personal projects and reference content (social accounts, newsletter signup, etc.).

Tools

I also build lots and lots of tools to help me make the most of my writing and knowledge collection.

How I Use It

I regularly review my posts to discover new connections and add links between them. The dense interlinking and backlink display creates a cross-pollination effect that helps surface related ideas. I don’t have a rigid research-to-writing workflow, but the site helps me identify patterns and develop new ideas over time.

For syndication, I follow specific rules to ensure content works well both on my site and on external platforms without losing context.

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 and Berkeley Mono.

Network graph views are powered by vis-network.

Popularity is tracked by Goatcounter - public stats are available at /analytics.

Guestbook comments are powered by Cusdis.

Webmentions are received at webmention.io.

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: two-test (v3.8.0-r3-gf407254a)
• Build time: 2026-03-26T08:50:44+00:00
• Posts count: 3693
• Tags count: 303
• First post date: March 14, 2011
• Last post date: March 24, 2026

Changelog

Unreleased

• /projects page
• podcast rendering
• More ideas

v3.8.0 “elegant-pull” — 2026-03-26

• Added Pre-Read page: contextualizes web pages against the knowledge garden using three agentic perspectives (proponent, opponent, questioner) powered by Jina Reader and Claude
• Upgraded suggest-comments val to agentic tool-use with Sonnet 4.6
• Added OR fallback to search for broader recall
• Added runtime tone guide for suggest-comments val
• Replaced LLM cleanup with deterministic paragraph extraction
• Improved search tool description for keyword-based queries
• Added /suggest and /pre-read links to footer
• Lighter visited links color in dark mode
• Hide site header on short viewports
• Added supporting links to beliefs page
• Enabled physics animation for network graph widget

v3.7.0 “play-blood” — 2026-03-24

• Added /suggest page that generates comment suggestions for any post from three perspectives (proponent, opponent, questioner) using Claude via a new Val Town backend
• Added /uncommented page listing notes with only quoted text and no original commentary, with a Random Note button for quick access
• Added utilities/suggest_comments CLI script for local comment suggestion via qmd + Claude Code
• New Jekyll plugin flags uncommented notes at build time
• Val Town backend combines LLM-generated search queries with keyword search for richer related post discovery

v3.6.0 “organ-stuff” — 2026-03-14

• Added BIP-39 word-pair codenames for site versions
• New utilities/version_name script for deterministic version naming
• Changelog entries now include codenames alongside semver tags

v3.5.0 — 2026-03-12

• Support audio file embeds and podcast feed at /feed/podcast.rss

v3.4.0 — 2026-03-12

• feat: add GitHub Action to sync releases to changelog
• feat: add iCal feed generation for all post categories
• feat: redesign homepage with Popular and Recent sections
• feat: add Claude Code GitHub Action for @claude mentions
• feat: generate color backgrounds for posts without images
• feat: show HackerNews and Reddit discussion links for note sources
• feat: add inline Chart.js liquid block tag plugin
• feat: support published frontmatter field in issue poster
• feat(search): set page title based on search query
• perf: optimize Jekyll build by rewriting backlinks and enabling YJIT
• style: replace blue palette with Klein blue
• style: replace season emoji with minimal geometric markers
• fix: guard date display in Reference layout
• fix(ical): use precise timestamps instead of all-day events
• fix: apply site theme colors to inline charts

2026-03-11

• Show HackerNews discussion link for note sources (lazy-loaded via Algolia HN Search API)
• Show Reddit discussion link for note sources (lazy-loaded via Reddit API)

2026-03-10

• Remove Cusdis comments widget from posts (no one was leaving comments)

2026-03-09

• Generate unique color backgrounds for posts without images, using URL hash and The Color API

2026-03-06

• Remove iine like button from posts

2026-02-19

• Redesign homepage: replace beliefs wall with Popular and Recent post sections
• Move beliefs to dedicated /beliefs page
• New homepage intro paragraph

2026-02-16

• Add iCal feeds (.ics) for all posts and per-category, with RFC 5545 compliance, geo coordinates, and image references

2026-02-13

• Add inline Chart.js support via {% chart %} Liquid block tag (demo)

2026-02-03

• Add encrypted posts with client-side decryption via Web Crypto API
• Add user preferences settings page for customizing site behavior

2026-02-02

• Add Letterboxd like count display on movie review posts
• Add /llms.txt following the llmstxt.org spec for AI discoverability
• Add /llms guide page for AI tools with citation guidelines and content policies
• Add Schema.org JSON-LD structured data (Person, WebSite, Article schemas)
• Add robots.txt with explicit AI crawler allowances

2026-01-20

• Add like button to posts via iine

2025-12-17

• Add exercise stats page with line charts for hours, miles, and average duration per month
• Add monthly aggregate stats (active days, total time, miles) to exercise index

2025-11-29

• Add advanced search filters: restrict by field (title, content, tags, etc.), document type, category, and date range
• Support q=* wildcard to return all documents for filter-only searches

2025-11-16

• Default to showing comments section
• Add HackerNews comments/points display
• Add webmention count display and form to submit them

2025-09-14

• Site layout redesign (details)

2025-08-20

• Render next/previous posts in the same subcategory on post pages

2025-08-17

• Add a basic photos page to display photo-featured posts

2025-07-04

• Import videos from YouTube as blog posts

2025-06-29

• Add Daily Review page to display daily reviews from Readwise

2025-06-07

• Add Anchors page to display posts with most backlinks
• Bring back the comments section on posts
• Display Mastodon and Bluesky replies/like counts on posts

2025-06-01

• Add Sequences page to display linked posts in a sequence

2025-05-18

• Importing Reader top-level document notes as Notes posts

2025-03-15

• Add a Heatmap Calendar of posts

2024-12-21

• Import posts from Bluesky as posts and replies

2024-12-15

• Import reviews from Letterboxd as blog posts

2024-12-08

• Add link facets to Bluesky syndication

2024-12-07

• Import posts from Mastodon as replies and blog posts

2024-12-02

• Switch back to variable fonts
• Refactor general post layout and headings

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