about-this-site.md

layout	title	searchable	tags
Page	About This Site	true	index personal-blog

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::https://github.com/joshbeckman/notes]] 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 Tinylitics.

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

Changelog

Unreleased

• better h-card markup for posts
• /projects page
• /now page (ref)
• Random image on homepage
• podcast rendering

• move content markup into liquid filters instead of liquid logic
• change styling/colors by season

• Post to mastodon or something via GitHub action build pipeline

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