layout	title	permalink
page	~/README	/～/README

[ greetings ]

sup, this is my website. it's built on jekyll, with javascript built via webpack and stuffed into jekyll assets. aside from layouts and styles, everything is just markdown, and each markdown file gets a page -- including this readme.

[ nifty bits ]

to prove my credentials a l33t hax0r™, the site follows a loose terminal/shell theme with uncomfortable light on dark text. the cute little login sequence pretends that you've ssh-ed into a remote host and then install some mumbo jumbo and run it. lowercase just for the aesthetic, and to scare away boomers.

[ less ]

to keep with the terminal/shell theme, text pages are printed sorta like they would be if dumped to the terminal via the unix less utility. mostly this just means that there's a little indicator in the bottom left that shows a colon when there is content remaining to scroll, and (EOF) when scrolled to the bottom. better still, j and k can be used to control the scroll position of the central content, once again à la less.

[ hacks ]

the homepage is named with a tilde to keep with the whole shell theme, but this creates some (maybe predictable) challenges. it seems that jekyll doesn't like it if pages are named with ~, nor can i use /~ as a permalink on a page with a different name. but i'm determined and stubborn, so using the magic of unicode we fake it with the similar-enough "full-width tilde" character: ～. then we use this character both to name the page's markdown file and the permalink in its frontmatter. as a last spicy complication, the jekyll relative_url filter seems to replace ～ with ~, so in a risky bet, we just skip this filter when generating the nav bar (in _includes/header.html) and voilà. of course no one could ever be expected to type the correct tilde, so with a tricky little bit of javascript served on the 404 page, we rewrite any url starting with ~ to its equivalent using the jekyll-supported ～. this was a massive pain in the ass.