For a while I’ve been using justified text to give blockquotes on the site a distinct visual language, I like it, even though algorithmically justified text on the web is far from perfect, with certain...

In continuing to ratchet up the strictness of the build system I landed on the concept of dataclasses, which are new to this novice programmer, though the concept of a schema for validation is not. Anyway,...

CSS is pure mayhem, but whatever, it’s what we’ve got. For a long time I’ve had reasonably good responsive image galleries. Really the last remaining roadblocks has been with those galleries where I’ve...

I’m including more and larger code snippets in documents throughout the site — such as this one — and I didn’t like that these were being counted amongst the ‘wordcount’ of the site. I’ve always...

The stats page has long shown a count of the number of unique external links referenced on the site. Before this change the stats showed 483 unique external links, the relevant code is contained in the...

Up to now, image references, eg. [::ImageAlt](img:​:5f39dd4e) have functioned like so: The source section (between parentheses) is substituted directly from the asset manifest, in this case referenced by...

A very minor change to resolve a bit of acute visual nit-picking. The space in eg, ‘p. 56’, ‘Ch. 7’, ‘Vol. 9’, or ‘(3rd edition)’, created by my attribution logic, could cause the two parts to appear on...

While viewing my nonsense page with the network tab of the developer tools open I noticed the page was transferring a total of 15.8MB to load. The page loads hundreds of posts so this isn’t completely...

Added import references, restoring and improving the functionality of the ‘transclude’ reference that I previously deprecated and removed. Has two modes, both of which support comments. import, transcludes...

Currently a given reference may optionally include a url key, with a single URL as its value. The idea of a single canonical URL for every resource is somewhat limiting. Replacing the current key/value url...

Pavlos posed the question as I hitch hiked back to my line after detouring back to Albania to see Jess, but it had slipped from my mind until just now when I overheard someone at the hostel ask, “What’s...

Implementation was pretty straight forward after getting the regex right to treat ‘=html’ blocks as raw. Changes located in the run_jotdown function and the new highlightcode_ function, as well as fiddling...

Currently, when I quote a piece of text, it lives fully contained in it’s own document. If I want to write some commentary about it or note down some related references, I create a second note which...

I was playing around with serif fonts a bit and, landing on Source Serif, I found something that fit with my style in a way that no others did. Visually quite a big change, the previous body font was the...

This proposal is very much a work in progress. You may not find anything useful in here yet. This is a meta-proposal, documenting the process of constructing a small metadata vocabulary for the documents...

Switched map tiles provider from Thunder Forest Outdoors to maptiler. Much prefer the topographic styling of these maps. They even offer a set of satellite tiles if I decide I want that option in the...

Previously the main feed on the site, linked to from the , was ‘everything’ but this is a bit of a firehose with all my quotes, notes, nonsense, and links et al, so I’ve created a ‘main’ feed with a...

Since the switch to TOML some photographs and figures/images have remained, lingering in the static assets directory. As of today, all such assets have made their way into manifests.

Previously I was using a pseudo-YAML for document frontmatter and JSON for the asset manifests. I’ve switched both to TOML, partly for it’s simpler parsing but really entirely because I much prefer its...

Replaced my previous hand rolled site search that brute-forced an ungainly blob of JSON. Opted for pagefind as I knew I wanted to stick with static search that I can compile at build time. Will tweak styles...

Used Anthropics Claude 3.5 Sonnet LLM to iterate on a new JavaScript lightbox/gallery for my site that solves the quirks and annoyances of my previous attempt. Namely it now closes on browser-back as users...

Process with Plustek 8200i Preparation: Clean hands and clear workspace Plug in and power on scanner Open VueScan Check configuration has loaded and is correct Glove your left hand Scanning routine: Number...

Where are you most peculiar? I think that’s a good question for figuring out where our purpose lies, that is, where our attention lingers. That thing that we return to again and again, which occupies an...

A straightforward, non-dogmatic introduction to Vipassanā Meditation from a group of meditation teachers who teach in the Plum Village and Insight Meditation traditions. The first (15 minute) meditation is...

Deprecated and removed the somewhat ambiguous id:: substitution reference in favour of slug:: so that it is always clear what a reference will be substituted with. This change also obviated the need for the...

Made created a required metadata element, removing previous behaviour whereby it could be omitted and auto populated using the published field.

Switched from separating YAML metadata in a for loop, to using the Python Frontmatter library. Added dependency: Python Frontmatter Removed dependency: PyYAML

This proposal aims to introduce yet more rigour and consistency into the ‘vocabulary’ of metadata terms that I use both in the building of this site but also more broadly. In that sense it is not strictly a...

Replaced author metadata element with creator as I gradually formalise the metadata terms used in my own infrastructure. creator generalises much better to a broader media set. For example: if I’m...

MILESTONE 100,000 words! Here, on this little site of mine. Six figures of attempts at speaking.

Added the lightgallery library to the site for multi-image galleries, replacing my previous self built solution. While I slightly mourn adding a dependency, it’s all self-hosted, and the resulting lightbox...

Added pillow-heif to build requirements to support compressing/processing HEIC images. For the time being HEIC/HEIF images are turned into JPEGs as browsers don’t natively support them.

Fix: Non-modal images no longer appear clickable via cursor and opacity shift

As more and more (eventually all) of the assets that make up this site are specified through JSON manifests, these become a natural entry point for a test harness. Check the ‘source’ field points to a valid...

Currently all images are compressed to a fixed ‘quality’ level, this works fine but in some cases (particularly if I’m including an image that has already been compressed/optimised) this results in double...

Expand include handling to allow any file to be referenced and included from within any document. This will necessarily have to build on the from the asset manifest. One example would be being able to embed...

Dropped Cloudflare. This site was previously hosted via Cloudflare Pages, today I migrated back to a server that I control.

This site runs on a server that I administer located in London. I call this server Wanderer, which is perhaps a bit of an oxymoron given that, being a lifeless hunk of metal, it does not move. I guess I’m...

Attach a datetime to (relevant) metadata elements. Example: the proposed ‘confidence’ metadata could track when a document’s confidence status changed from eg ‘middling’ to ‘high’ in this way. confidence: -...

Djot includes a syntax for marking block content as only being relevant to specific outputs. The below snippet (were it not escaped) would not be visible unless I ran it through a ‘task’ specific parser....

Asides, sidenotes, footnotes, endnotes. Whichever is used, there is often utility in being able to include supplementary information without breaking up the flow or focus of a document. Currently I use...

Currently the unique identifier for a document or other object is stored in its metadata as “uid”. Key seems perhaps more in line with my desire for metadata keys to be clear and descriptive than the...

My goal for my system of files is for it to be durable through time. To that effect, encoding UTC offsets makes a lot of sense, especially so given that in the last five years I have lived in 6 different...

I store my files on a filesystem, this site is built from that filesystem. This system works for me, but I am interested in research developments in the area of Optimistic Replication, chiefly the promise...

A lot of the design of this site has to do with taxonomies, the filing and labelling of the ‘artefacts’ that I produce, be they words, photographs, drawings, audio recordings etc. Taxonomies don’t have to...

With SEP 48: Remove assets from notes directory on the road map I still want to preserve the ability to build the site fully locally with asset preview etc. The way forward I see here is in the use of an...

Currently all the sites assets and everything needed to build it live within my ‘notes’ directory. This has advantages in terms of keeping everything needed all together, meaning less has to be mentally...

Switched from markdown to Djot (See SEP 13: Switch to a more reasonable source markup language) for lightweight document markup. Djot offers many conveniences in terms of consistency and reasonability. This...

Not logging a specific change, simply recording here that the average full site build time now exceeds 2.5 seconds. This is with a total of 84457 words published to the site across 5 document types, 17...

This is a weird one, but I want a way to reflect both when something was written and when it occurred. For example, I have a memory: Hassan and I stole lollies from Mrs C’s supply cupboard at lunchtime...

This site has a changelog. I’m pretty remiss at updating it, and in many ways these proposals have made it redundant in terms of tracking major changes to the site itself. But this proposal isn’t for the...

Implemented the first incarnation of document transclusion, allowing me to include whole documents from within other documents.

Status: Finished but then removed Date: 2023-04-18 Commit: dd90cb05d8362d869252587e054df23d8d479daf Code complete Date: 2023-04-20 Added silent include handler 'sin::' for transcluding without a visible...

Since ✅ SEP 12: Reference documents by their URN/UUID was implemented I have been making much more extensive use of interlinking between documents, safe in the knowledge that changes in those documents...

Currently (2023-04-17), the code in the build script that produces ‘Collections’ flattens the hierarchy of types, tags, and classes. A document of type: references ends up in collections["references"] in...

This should await resolution of SEP 13: Switch to a more reasonable source markup language as the transition to Djot or another parser would be an ideal time to create stronger semantic ties to the document...

Removed hand drawn lines introduced a year ago, they only add clutter.

Comprehensive metadata overhaul. Implemented the — long ago proposed — document types to the site taxonomy, as well classes.

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-16 Commit: 12af74e3bc8f3ff029344ddca7681dc27be55ef0 As I get a stronger sense of the emerging taxonomies of this project and my writing I’m feeling more confident about...

A network of nodes/documents can be visualised in different ways in order to provide contextualising overviews and visual entry-points into the graph/tree. This proposal emerged from SEP 39: Metadata:...

🏗 SEP 26: Make page/site metadata accessible from HTML

Currently the location metadata element is a simple string referencing the city I was in (or based in) when a document was written. I was struck today by the thought that this information could be...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-16 Commit: 12af74e3bc8f3ff029344ddca7681dc27be55ef0 Related to SEP 36: Build a link archive and ✅ SEP 4: Add taxonomical types alongside tags. An earlier version of this...

Status: Active as of 2023-04-13 Decision: Document types will remain plural in service of the reader. Directly related to ✅ SEP 4: Add taxonomical types alongside tags and ✅ SEP 41: New metadata element:...

MILESTONE 75,000 words on the site.

I’ve experimented with a number of different methods of digital bookmarking over the years. Mostly plaintext files with long lists of vague thematically organised links; a brief go with Pocket; and more...

Status: Partially implemented. Date: 2023-04-20 Shallow and full builds are fully functional, the so called 'normal' build that works with a partial cache but can still rebuild where new interlinks are...

Most documents on the site do not contain images, but images being images, they are always going to take up more space than textfiles. At time of writing (2023-04-11) there are 178 images on the site, most...

Documents on this site have three datetime related metadata keys: created: when the document was first created updated: the last time the documents content was updated published: when the document was first...

Status: Partially Implemented Date: 2023-04-16 Commit: 12af74e3bc8f3ff029344ddca7681dc27be55ef0 Tags removed from index rages. 'nofeed' option still in use. Consider removing tags from index pages. The...

Another proposal arising from my admiration of the Python PEP website. Internal links to other PEPs have the full title of the PEP in the title element so that a link like ‘PEP 1’, when hovered over, will...

I find the sidebar table-of-contents at peps.python.org particularly pleasing. I currently have a somewhat similar design for pages that make use of a TOC, but it is made slightly awkward by rigidly...

At build time all of the documents in the build are assembled inside the data variable. Metadata is added, stats are compiled, options are processed, and a final HTML document is emitted to the filesystem....

✅ SEP 14: UUID collision checking addressed the risk of UUID collisions but the issue of slug collision still remains. At time of writing, of the 344 documents on the site, 265 of them have a datetime...

I try to keep the stylesheet (CSS) for the site pretty lean, and in so far as is possible style on the basis semantic rather than heavily class based HTML. Even still, the stylesheet can feel unwieldy at...

Fixed footer to bottom of viewport. Besides being more visually consistent when documents are short, also allows for paging between short documents (changelogs, nonsense, etc) using the navigation links in...

Status: Initial Implementation Date: 2023-04-15 Commit: 2ee7f1c67275c30b9d8674c6f655144baf74e209 Initial Implementation Currently if I want to get the UUID for a document, or any other metadata I need to go...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-09 Commit: 733b7e5f73a09e1835bae883d38bb00fd9c861a3 Used a simple CSS Flexbox on the body element with an auto-margin on the footer. Doesn't seem to have triggered any...

Document frontmatter (explicit metadata) keys are currently written in lowercase (see Appendix: Lowercase below). I’m considering switching to uppercase keys (see Appendix: Uppercase for an example). The...

Documents should have an explicit lang attribute in the metadata. Where none is specified it would be reasonable to default to the authors preferred language. (Could be specified in site['author']['lang'])

Currently (2023-04-09) document frontmatter is authored in YAML (pyyaml). I don’t particularly like yaml. It’s quite heavy weight dependency given that all I need is a set key/value pairs and lists. In some...

Partial rewrite, significant changes to major subsystems. Overhaul backlink extraction in order to drop BeautifulSoup as a dependency, (See ✅ SEP 16: Extract backlinks from plaintext). New system works on...

I don’t use relative URLS on this site for reasons of robustness: in the event that a document moved (or a section of a document containing a relative URL was copied into another document) that relative URL...

Going forward this will be automated but for the existing set of documents the transformation will have to be at best semi-automated ie, script aided but with manual checking. This will take the form of an...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-08 Commit: e521f96aa448b83f61e25b9f986e17456934ec15 Implemented in the `build_backlinks()` function with a simple deduplicated counter on total backlinks inserted. Stored in...

This is considered a blocking issue for SEP 17: Document Transclusion. I have long wanted summaries of documents. I envision three ways of defining a document summary (and intend to implement all three as...

A previous version of this proposal was titled Allow internal references to include automatic snippets. The recent implementation of ✅ SEP 12: Reference documents by their URN/UUID represents the thin end...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-08 Commit: e521f96aa448b83f61e25b9f986e17456934ec15 > Implemented during a rewrite of `build_backlinks()` function. Allowed > dependency on Beautiful Soup library to be...

I like the specification for Atom Feeds, it is both reasonable and thorough, as any good spec ought to be. I have only one problem with the Atom specification and that is the requirement that all feed...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-07 Commit: e521f96aa448b83f61e25b9f986e17456934ec15 Implemented within the `ingest_documents()` function using a UUID prefix check. This will cause an abort if ever two 8...

18:42 Reducing waste through a deeper understanding of needs I haven’t really found the right way to characterise this one, yet it is reflected in every aspect of my life, go figure. Hey, I’m working on it,...

Increasingly in my life I’m realising that the solutions to life’s challenges emerge best in/from conversation, and my success in life follows directly from finding the right people to talk to, people I can...

This is a foundational belief for me, one on which much of my understanding of the world rests. Read Heidegger, the German Philosopher, for more on this. See here for an example of a development of my...

A belief system is often visualized/expressed as a number of pillars which taken together form the core of that system of beliefs. I will also use the analogy of pillars, but in exploring that analogy I...

Markdown is far and away the dominant lightweight markup language for authoring documents that are later to be processed into HTML. Unfortunately, Markdown is poorly specified. John Gruber gave a great gift...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-07 Commit: e521f96aa448b83f61e25b9f986e17456934ec15 Code complete Date: 2023-04-15 Commit: 00147859efc5a8547b47b099cb93c729e358888f All internal reference links across all...

It should be possible to define the relationship between a series of documents. This is likely best done in the frontmatter so that data can be accessed both in the build and from within documents. The...

Does meaning exist without emotion? To state my bias upfront, I am attached (emotionally, how else) to the idea that meaning is inherently emotional, that without emotion there is no meaning. That said, I...

I want to feel more free to write about very niche things and publish them alongside the things I write that have broader appeal. Indicating the audience a given post is intended might help with this....

A previous version of this proposal was called Frontmatter defined redirect rules. This was later changed to Metadata: document alts Add a ‘redirects’ fontmatter element to site. Should support a list of...

I’m interested in a life without keys, a world where keys are redundant, relegated to ornamental functions, where trust is sacred and unbroken. What does it say about our society that things, belongings,...

Status: Accepted, Partially Implemented Date: 2023-04-07 Commit: 2e8d3642645defd8975096d8c12917b688ca2281 Settled on SEP (Site Enhancement Proposal) See SEP 44: Short Reference Syntax for the ongoing...

Status: Partially Implemented Date: 2022-09-16 Commit: 56837160c39d767067cc6567b386c71343c2b5a0 Almost fully implemented. Remaining to do: add reverse sort support, clarify terms in build script. Currently...

Image pop-in can cause jarring layout shift during page load. This can be avoided by specifying the height and width of each image inside the img element. Example: img src="example-image.jpg" width="500"...

Since 2022-06-01 posts using the default layout get automatic breadcrumb navigation of the form tag[0] / title. Where tag[0] is ‘journal’ they also receive non-hyperlinked date crumbs ie, JOURNAL / 2022 /...

Status: Finished Date: 2023-04-16 Commit: 12af74e3bc8f3ff029344ddca7681dc27be55ef0 Code complete Currently the site has the concept of tags, a document can have any number of tags, and can define new tags...

Currently the data model and pipeline I have built can accommodate building feeds/collections from one or more tags, I want to improve the granularity of this feature so that feeds/collections could be...

Sometimes we have to copy data from source to a discrete document before publishing, and with one-off instances like quoting from a book or an article this makes sense. But when we’re dealing with...

WARNING: This proposal probably necessitates a move away from a static site architecture, and in that respect probably represents that largest outstanding proposal. Careful thought will have to be given to...

Look at this catalogue. In it’s midst is a section called ‘Sony Personals’, within you’ll find a long list of Sony Walkman models ranging in price from $19.95 to $619.95. At the beginning of April, 1992...

MILESTONE 50,000 words published on the site.

Subset Inter font family, reducing font assets from 312KB to 60KB.

Implemented stylesheet cache-busting by appending the MD5 hash of the stylesheet as a [URL query string].

Fixed backlinks not all populating due to KeyError

There is an explosion of activity in this space at the moment. People like Andy Matuschak are finding creative ways to fund research in this space while tools like Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, and Athens race to...

Is death the last chapter, or the infinite after? I realise this sounds like a complete waffle of a question, and for we secular souls it is certainly unanswerable in any concrete sense, but still I like to...

Added a /humans.txt page. Had come across them before, but credit to Dave Gauer and his humans.txt for prompting me to add one of mine own.

Okay so here’s the thing, the web got too big. way. too. BIG. The web outgrew itself, swallowed itself up, and is rapidly swallowing us all up to. I liked the web a lot better when it was scrappy and small,...

Added the Inter font, prefer it’s spacing and readability. Currently only supporting WOFF2 as unsupported clients can always fall back to system defaults. My only gripe with Inter is I feel its italic type...

I don’t like this question, I’m not sure it’s a question that can be answered or even really explored, but still it has been rattling around in my head for so long that I feel the need to preserve it here....

Added ‘breadcrumbing’ to all leaf posts, making it easier to navigate ‘back up the tree’ of a series or return to parent category.

Integrated some art that I admire into the ‘hub’ pages of the site.

Added nonsense, my little tumblog/twitter/microblog/stream of unconsciousness page, another room to fill with words and noise.

Removed handwritten font face, realising that it doesn’t suit my design principles, chiefly my desire for a cruft-free reading experience.

Ingredients – 8 servings ½ cup of water ½ cup thinly sliced onion 6 cloves garlic 2tbsp minced ginger 2 minced chili peppers 4 cups thinly sliced carrots 2 pinches sea salt 6 cups veg broth 1½ cups coconut...

Reverted change to feeds made on Mar 20, 2022. Take silasjelley.com/feeds/notes for example, why not place its feed at silasjelley.com/notes/feed? In that example I agree that the latter structure is just...

Crossed 25,000 words published on this little post-it note of a website.

Added a handwritten font face to be used for elements.

Added a questions page containing a few questions I would love to receive other people’s input on.

Introduced hand-drawn-style lines for underlines and horizontal rules to break up the hard edges of the site.

Changed feed path URIs from the form /feeds/collection to /collection/feed to make them more intuitively discoverable.

Testing effect, also referred to as retrieval practice, is the finding that attempts to retrieve something from our memory have the effect of strengthening that memory. Where testing is often regarded as...

Added a page to guide visitors in how to use this site.

We can go great stretches of time without any big changes occurring in our lives – sometimes big changes happen to us and we are forced to change, but this is not very interesting from the perspective of...

Added a now page, cribbed from Derek Sivers.

Added search to the site.