Status: firm

Colophon

First off I have to say that this site owes much to Maggie Appleton⤴︎ and Gwern Branwen⤴︎. When I began looking into the ideas of switching from a straight blog format to a digital garden⤴︎, their sites were a revelation. Maggie’s site is so beautifully designed, it immediately made sense to me. Visually, it is a delight. Gwern’s site is an astounding example of interconnectivity and organization. The depth of care and consideration given to navigation and visual consistency is inspiring. You should check them out for examples of how it’s done.

This site is built with the 11ty⤴︎ static site generator. I’ve gone back and forth, and circled around so many different platforms it makes my head spin. I’ve built small projects with 11ty before, but this time I decided to go all in. The main factor being a desire to keep my content/data in a easily repurposed format (plain text.)

When it comes to the tech, I wish I could call myself an innovator, but ham-and-egger is a more appropriate description.

I use Obsidian⤴︎ to compose the content for the site. The Obsidian vault is located in 11ty’s source folder, so changes are immediately reflected when the dev server is running.

I have template folders set up in Obsidian, so that when I create a new post in a particular folder (category) Obsidian creates a new file with the appropriate YAML front matter already filled in. The title is automatically slugified and used for the file name.

For the micro format posts (Moments,) I use “YYYY-MM-DD” format for the file name. Posts occurring on the same day are incremented by the Obsidian template script to 2025-01-22-2, 2025-01-22-3, etc.

For the books listed on the site, I decided not to create posts for each book but rather to have them collected in a JSON data file. I have a Python script to update books.json from a spreadsheet where I store everything. Seems to be working well. It will keep hundreds of books from cluttering the source directories of my other posts.

I haven’t gone the route of using my Git repository with something like Cloudflare⤴︎ or Vercel⤴︎ to trigger automatic builds and updates. I already have hosting at Opalstack⤴︎, so for the moment I’m using Transmit⤴︎ with good old-fashioned SFTP to update the site.

I chose the colors to try and reflect a natural environment. I’ve got sand, grass and trees covered. I’m still thinking about ways to implement some water and sky by fitting in some blues.

The type is Zilla Slab⤴︎ everywhere. I tried lots of other combinations, but always ended up back with Zilla. I hope visitors will find it readable.

I have added Tinylytics⤴︎ so I can see if anyone comes by. Not for any other reason than to know I’m not alone on the web.

That’s about it! If you have questions/suggestions about the site, I’d love to hear from you. Send me and email and I’ll be sure to reply.