Site Design
When I was putting together ideas for a personal site, I kept coming back to how much I love old documents and books. So, I figured I might as well lean into that! The whole philosophy, from the way the site is laid out, to the site aesthetic, and everything else centers around this academic document-core theming. Which, honestly, I think has turned out amazingly!
The Garden and The Stream
Entries on this site are divided into two types: Garden and Stream entries. The Garden collects notes that are added to and revised over time, developing from initial “Seedlings” into “Saplings” and then “Evergreens” once the content is fully formed and fleshed out. Everything in the Garden is constantly growing, changing, and morphing, and nothing is ever quite “finished”. The Stream, on the other hand, contains shorter and more immediate entries. These can be observations, reactions, passing thoughts, or just status updates, like a stream of consciousness. Generally, once an entry is posted to the Stream, it doesn’t change. Though, I may post new entries building on or moving away from previous ones.
So, in basic terms, The Garden is where I plant my big ideas and tend to them, whereas The Stream is where I drop smaller ideas to float away.
Backgrounds
Unless you’re on a really thin screen, you may have noticed the backgrounds. These are all public domain paintings of the Romantic movement around the turn-of-the-century. Each painting has a credit at the bottom-right, which also links you to where I found it (usually ArtVee).
I chose Romantic landscapes in particular because:
- I just really like the style (one of my favorite art pieces is Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich), and
- The vibe and time period of them really matched what I was going for. Not quite as wistful and subdued as Impressionist ones, but also not as bombastic or legendary as earlier movements. I’m not any sort of art historian, but Romanticism really hits a sweet spot for me, and felt perfect for my personal site.
How It’s Built
The site is generated by Hugo, a static site generator. Content is written in Markdown with YAML front matter, and Hugo’s template system handles everything else from the layout to inheritance, section routing, and pulling in data from YAML files for dynamic content. Last-modified dates are pulled automatically from Git history rather than maintained by hand, just to make things way easier.
The generated web files are hosted on Neocities (which also has a comment section, if you’re interested in leaving one ;) ). Source files are maintained in VSCode and version-controlled with Git, with deployment to Neocities automated via GitHub Actions on every push to main. The source code is available on GitHub.
The design and templates were developed with assistance from Claude by Anthropic. While Claude assisted with the design and technical aspects of the site, everything was reviewed manually and all the content on the homepage, Garden, Stream, etc, is human-written.
The site uses no JavaScript frameworks, no analytics, and no tracking. The only external dependency is Google Fonts. There is limited JavaScript use for the most part, though there are some notable small snippets: inserting the current year into the footer, filling the spine with a repeating page label, scroll-triggering the art credit, randomly selecting a quote to display on the homepage, etc. The biggest use of JavaScript is for the link previews, which is not insignificant and thus is kept relatively lightweight.