How this site is built
A short colophon, and the reasoning behind each thing I left out.
- Published
- 28 August 2026
- Filed under
- Meta, Web
- Length
- 219 words
- Reading
- 1 min
This is the first entry, so it may as well document the machine it is running on.
The stack, in full
Markdown files in a Git repository. GitHub Pages runs Jekyll over them on every push and serves static HTML. That is the entire stack. There is no database, no server I maintain, and no deploy pipeline to babysit.
Publishing a new post means adding one file and pushing it. Nothing else.
What I left out, and why
No analytics. I would check the numbers, the numbers would start shaping what I write, and I would end up writing for a graph instead of for a reader.
No comments. Anyone who wants to argue can email me. The friction is the feature.
No newsletter box. If you want to follow along there is a feed, which has worked fine for twenty years and asks for nothing in return.
Almost no JavaScript. There is a clock in the readout strip. That is it. The site works with scripting disabled.
On dating opinions
Every post here carries a date, and I intend to leave old ones up even after I disagree with them. Quietly editing the past to look consistent is a small lie that gets easier every time you tell it. Better to let the contradiction sit there in public.