Colophon

A colophon is a page that describes how the site is made, with what tools, supporting what technologies.

This website is written in Python and made using Wagtail built on top of Django. The source code is freely available on Github.

When making the website, I'm inspired by the indieweb movement trying to make it more personal and fun than writing on one of the big platforms. It also gives me more control of my data, and the presentation of which; for example, letting me embed interactive widgets into essays, and create new ways of discovery.

I try to keep the design somewhat minimal partly because I don't have the design skills to make stunning designs, and partly because I don't want to do huge redesigns every few years as trends change. I think the design reminds me of simple text on paper.

I follow a mindset of progressive enhancement. I start simple, and make small improvements as needed letting them slowly accumulate into something special.

front-page full window

Changelog

The website has been running in various forms since 2016, but the modern version of the site started in January 2023.

2024

  • December: Improved accessibility of image components, and added new image gallery. Added creation and update date pills to the top of articles to make it easy to see if the article is relevant. Streamlined byline with @author. Fixed issues with search indexing, and made the search field autofocus. Started using Plausible for privacy preserving analytics as opposed to Google Analytics. Added guest-cursors.
  • July: Improved project list layout, and improved mobile layout. Fixed some style bugs introduced in June. Made it easier to filter and discover tags. Added more ways to discover related Pages to the page you're currently reading. Added HTMX lazy loading of recommendations as well as dynamic search (It was delightfully easy). Added support for hover previews for internal links in article bodies. Added RSS feeds, and the ability to customize your feed to get only the content you are interested in.
  • June: A rather big update introducing a number of big and small new features focused around making it easier to find the things you want.
    • New content types: (notes and essays). Essays are longer form content with a higher degree of editing whereas notes are shorter and meant to make it easier for me to publish some smaller thoughts I have without cluttering up the main feed.
    • Garden: I took the first steps in creating a digital garden. Creating the content classification system, and a very rudimentary way of filtering based on those classifications.
    • Icons everywhere: I added icons for content types, the garden classification and navigation.
    • Improved navigation: I improved the navigation menu to include sub-categories which can be expanded on desktop, and needs some more work on mobile.
    • Header links in essays: Added links to headers in essays which show when you hover over a heading making it easier to link to specific sections of an essay.
    • Start here page: Added a start here page to give new readers an entrypoint for navigating the site. This is part of a larger plan to add more topic organisation.
    • Improved HomePage layout: To make the (non-content) pages more flexible in their layout to make it easier to add more custom pages in the future.
    • Started colophon page.

2023

  • January: First version of the modern iterations of this website. I prefer to keep the older history forgotten.

Features

Some notable features on this website.

  • Guest cursors allow visitors to see other visitors' cursors on the same page.
  • Automatic backlinking when linking to internal content. I use this for recommendation.
  • Trending pages. I keep track of which pages are visited the most in a rolling period, and rank the top performing pages as trending.
  • Customizable web feeds. Parametrically able to generate feeds, and customize them to only show the things you're interested in. When setting up the feed, it will dynamically load a preview of what the feed will look like before it gives you a link which you can import into your Atom/RSS reader.
  • Hover preview for internal links in article body.
  • HTMX support for dynamic search, lazy loading article recommendations, as well as pleasant transitions between articles using in-article links and recommendations.