Meta aka how this site was made

Technologies

I use Jekyll to generate my site and I host it on GitHub Pages. Everything is open source – check it out on my GitHub, and feel free to fork it if you want.

I originally started with Maxime Vaillancourt’s Digital Garden Jekyll template, which gave me a bunch of nice features like backlinking, link previews, and a wiki map.

Visual style

I use three typefaces, all through Adobe Fonts:

  • Freight Text Pro
  • Freight Sans Pro
  • Nitti

I also use a couple of Maxime’s original styling, like deeplinks and hover states.

Site structure

Essays

Essays are longform content where I develop an opinion or point of view. Each essay has a growth stage associated with it to help give an idea of how much thought I’ve put into it so far, and they’re also organized by last updated since they’re worked on over time.

  • Freshly planted ideas that need more exploring.
  • Has a good foundation. More growth is expected.
  • Fairly established. Minor edits might still happen.

Notes

Notes are collections of information, observations, and sources for random topics that catch my eye. They’re organized alphabetically to make it easy to find a particular topic.

Journal

The journal is my outlet for everything else I feel like sharing. Right now, it’s divided into thoughts and visuals where it houses photos, life updates, and streams of consciousness.

They’re organized chronologically because timeliness – i.e. the whatabouts of my life as a timestamp of that moment – is the most valuable part about it.

There are two link styles depending on type:

Site meta notes

I like to process textually by leaving notes for myself, separate from the content. I do that through the form of meta notes.

// This is a meta note.

Inspiration

This site embraces the philosophy of a digital garden, and much of it is built on ideas I picked up from Maggie Appleton. She notes Mike Caufield as being the original source of the concept, but I credit her with advocating for it and making it accessible.

I have also drawn inspiration from: