Elementary Complexity — Writing

The public source for all writing published at elementarycomplexity.com/writing.

Articles, think pieces, research notes, and governance proposal supplements live here as plain Markdown. The website is a derivative of these files; the files are sovereign.

Why this repo exists

• Canonical URLs for ideas. A piece at elementarycomplexity.com/writing/<slug> is the public, durable address. The Markdown source in this repo is the version that survives any platform.
• Forkable, citable, mirror-able. Clone it. Fork it. PR a typo. Quote a paragraph with a permalink to a specific line.
• Mirrored on-chain. Pieces also get published to a Simplepage for ENS / IPFS provenance.
• Plain markdown. No proprietary CMS, no walled garden, no algorithmic feed. At build time, the elementarycomplexity.com site pulls the posts/ folder from this repo, compiles each .md file through a pipeline called Scriptorium (part of the private site codebase), and outputs a fully rendered article page. Push to main here → site rebuilds within ~60 seconds.

Structure

posts/
  YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md      # one article per file
media/
  <any image, asset, or file referenced by a post>

Frontmatter contract

Every post starts with a YAML block:

---
title: The Loyalty-Gated Redemption Protocol
slug: loyalty-gated-redemption           # optional; defaults to filename minus the YYYY-MM-DD- prefix
date: 2026-05-15                         # ISO date; the canonical publication day
excerpt: A counter-proposal to GIP-150.  # 1–2 sentence summary for the index card + RSS
cover: ./media/lgrp-cover.png            # optional hero image (relative path, resolved at build time)
ogImage: ./media/lgrp-og.png             # optional OG image override
tags: [governance, gnosis, zk-proofs]    # free-form, lowercase
pinned: false                            # if true, floats to the top of /writing
status: published                        # draft | scheduled | published
publishedAt: 2026-05-15T10:00:00Z        # optional explicit timestamp; defaults to `date`
simplepage: https://writing.eth.link/loyalty-gated-redemption   # optional "also at" link
---

Renderer capabilities

The Scriptorium engine renders:

• CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown (tables, footnotes, task lists, strikethrough, autolinks)
• GFM Alerts (> [!NOTE], > [!WARNING], etc.)
• Math ($inline$ and $$block$$ via KaTeX)
• Syntax-highlighted code blocks (Shiki, server-rendered)
• Mermaid diagrams (themed)
• Directive blocks for structured embeds:
  • :::figure{src="..." caption="..." bleed="full"} — figures with captions, optional full-bleed
  • :::callout{type="note|tip|warning|danger|quote"} — themed asides
  • :::aside — Tufte-style sidenotes
• Iframe passthrough with a sanitized allowlist (YouTube, X, Loom, Spotify, NotebookLM, Vimeo, Mirror, Paragraph, Figma, gists, CodePen, CodeSandbox). Paste any source's <iframe> share code directly.
• Auto-embed: a bare URL alone on its own line becomes an embed (no shortcode needed).

How to publish

1. Add or edit a Markdown file in posts/.
2. Set status: published in frontmatter.
3. Commit + push to main.
4. The website rebuilds and the piece is live within ~30–60 seconds.
5. (Optional) Mirror the same .md to Simplepage for ENS / IPFS provenance.

License

Content is published under CC BY 4.0. Quote freely, attribute, link back.

Citing a piece

Cocchia, E. (YYYY). "<title>." Elementary Complexity.
https://elementarycomplexity.com/writing/<slug>