I wanted a more flexible way to show lists of related posts. The old way involved adding a collection block to a page’s front matter, like this:tomlCopy[collection] include = ["essays"]This worked,...

One of the outputs of this site is a plaintext file containing all the external links I reference across the site. I noticed recently that a couple of the Wikipedia links in there were incorrect. Wikipedia...

I figured it made good sense to see if there were any old skeletons lingering in stylesheet before I switch to inlining the core of my styles into the page head. Easily done with PurgeCSS so long as you can...

Added the right incantation to get fonts to pre-load, reducing request chaining by one hop.Note, crossorigin is required even though it’s from the same domain, else the browser will not use them and...

Turns out AVIF images, which I serve to all modern browsers visiting my site, weren’t included in the cache TTL that I use for all my static assets, oops.Here’s the updated cache control header for my caddy...

html5validator is turning up a whole littany of validation errors. There all pretty minor, but I like for everything I emit to be well formed.shCopyuvx html5validator --root /tmp/silasjelley.comNon...

Fixed a bug where code blocks were inadvertently being double subtracted from site.words.self (the wordcount of my own written prose), where they should only have been subtracted once.

Took a simple approach to speeding up rebuilds of the site that I’ve been meaning to crack on with for a while. Ripped out the old output_html function and replaced it with one that natively supports...

PENDING:[ ] Implement @terminal/shell/command[x] Implement @embedand replace aside:: and import:: substitutions/imports with @embed[ ] Make assets support backlinks so that @link can be used for assets too,...

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, I...

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. #link("img:​:5f39dd4e")[::ImageAlt] have functioned like so:The source section (between parentheses) is substituted directly from the asset manifest, in this case...

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 highlight_code 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 and...

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 \<head>, 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...

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...

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.textCopyAdded dependency: Python Frontmatter Removed dependency: PyYAML

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

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...

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...

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

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.

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

MILESTONE 75,000 words on the site.

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...

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 the...

18:42 Reducing waste through a deeper understanding of needsI 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...

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 am...

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,...

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 servingsCopy½ 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...

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 as...

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

Added a handwritten font face to be used for \<time> 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.