A peek behind the curtains: a colophon
This is my personal website. It is crafted with love and dedication and I try my best to make it work the way I want it to look on all web clients I can get my hands on. Generally, this includes about five desktop GUI browsers, three web engines, and a handful of TUI clients.
My personal site is where I explore accessibility and web design and experiment
with how far I can go with sticking with a border-radius
of 0. I also write
blog posts, share interesting links, shoutout to cool
blogs, among other things.
This page talks about how I do all of that.
Note
This is a
/meta
page. You should consider adding your own and documenting changes to your site too :)
# Overview
My website is statically generated by Hugo and hosted with Netlify. My gemini capsule, which is generated from the same source is hosted by Sourcehut Pages and is available at gmi.hedy.dev (What is gemini?). The source code is available on GitHub.
It currently supports a few microformats and I plan on adding more, including other IndieWeb features.
This site supports webmentions; you can use the form at the end of each post to manually send me a notification if you have authored content that referenced one of my posts.
To share your thoughts on a given topic or give general comments, however, I prefer corresponding via email.
Features on the site and certain content such as link gardens and blogrolls are largely inspired by ideas from the IndieWeb and the 32Bit Cafe. This website primarily hosts my blog, which you can subscribe to using RSS or Atom feeds listed here.
Accessibility is a priority, sometimes at the expense of certain UI design choices, though there are still some places I can do better on. I mostly test my site on my primary GUI browser and my primary TUI browser. Sometimes, I run it through validations and tests such as Lighthouse.
# Posting
Most of my posts are mirrored on Gemini. Some are converted from markdown by hand, others using a conversion tool and editorized manually. I plan to write a custom script that can convert markdown to gemtext without manual intervention as part of a new custom SSG I’m working on. I manually submit new gemlog posts on Antenna, and sometimes announce it on my fediverse account, especially if I’m currently participating in #100DaysToOffload or other writing challenges.
I write my drafts in Obsidian with a live-preview markdown editor and the iA Writer Duo font. The Obsidian vault I use serves both as a drafting environment and as a digital journal. Some posts might end up here on my website, in which case, I would create a new post with a shell script, paste the markdown, locally build, and finally publish in a single command. My publishing process is simply git-pushing to a remote repository that automatically deploys to netlify.
# Fonts
The following fonts are used on this site:
All written primary content for reading uses IBM Plex Sans, except for some blog posts which is displayed in iA Writer Duo. IBM Plex Mono is used for all code snippets and code blocks.
# Colors
The color scheme used throughout the site is inspired by Catppuccin themes, adjusted for better contrast and certain stylistic choices. The theme used for syntax highlighting code blocks use Catppuccin Latte in light mode and Catppuccin Mocha in dark mode, both are adjusted to satisfy at least WCAG AA rating for contrast.
# Webrings
This site is a part of several Webrings. Navigation links for all of them are listed at /
.
Orbits my gemini capsule is part of is also listed on its homepage.
# Member sites and badges
This site is also part of several “website clubs” and directories.
Feel free to let me know if you’d like me to join your webring or directory.
# Changelog
Newest entries are listed first.
## 2024 December
A guestbook is here!
Added external link indicator arrows and updated font weight of headings, inspired by muan.co.
Removed Inter and replaced body font with IBM Plex Sans.
Webring list redesigned and added descriptions.
## 2024 November
Webmentions other than links will no longer show after each post; the form to send webmentions will still be available. Comments are also removed.
Redesigned the blogroll. It also fetches from a YAML file rather than being hardcoded in HTML within markdown. Also added display of domain on blogroll and bookmark entries.
Dark theme redesigned based on Catppuccin Mocha and Frappe, fixed the display certain document elements. Adjusted Latte for syntax highlighting for better contrast (AA minimum).
Light theme redesigned based on Catppuccin Latte.
Put fetching of bookmarks part of the build script by using Raindrop’s API, which then processes JSON rather than CSV.
Added this changelog.
Added a bookmarks page that is generated from Raindrop’s CSV export for WWW, and is manually updated for the gemini version.
Added a blogroll page for interesting WWW personal sites as well as one for gemini and gopher sites on the gemini version.
Added a meta page, inspired by Seirdy’s site.