Site progress

2026-04-16

Things I’ve learned

  1. I can’t not play with the colors of my website
  2. Quarto currently doesn’t page from one post to the next. Maybe Quarto 2 will?
  3. Trying to remember all of the variations of { codes and their positions } especially since they’re different from what I was doing in Jekyll will take me a while. I should probably make a cheat sheet.

Technical stuff

This site is built with Quarto using RStudio. I considered Positron but I’m just starting to get used to RStudio!

I am “using” git for version control. Scare quotes because I mostly just push to main at the end of each session. Nothing here is going to cause satellites to fall because I didn’t use a branch. It is a github repo, but it’s private.

Posts are folders with an index.html inside them, and any associated bits and bobs like images. To create them, I found an addin to RStudio called quartopost. I edited it a little bit for my purposes, but it works pretty well!

I currently have 2 extensions

  • custom-callout which lets me have Attention Conservation Notice blocks ala Cosma Shalizi and Puzzle spoilers.
  • footnote-styles which lets me use different footnote markers. It works great for footnotes at the bottom of the page – I raised an issue because I am that weirdo that wants to put footnotes in the margin. I’m not quite ready to try fixing it for myself.

Design stuff

I followed some of the suggestions in this comprehensive presentation by Sam Shanny-Csik to decorate my site.

It’s due to her that I made my very first logo. Bill says it looks like what used to be called a hamburger menu (I’ve been away a while do they still call it that?).

He’s working on getting the SSL set up, so your browser might complain

IT’S A SANDWICH WHICH IS A JOKE ON MY INITIALS. I used some Adobe Express thingie to make it, and then edited it in Apple Pages and Preview. Don’t ask, we use what we think might work at the time.

Yes, I’m using scss because I’m a dork

Flashy For colors I started with inspo from Color Palette Bot and then revised until everything looked acceptable. You might recognize some of them if you’re reading this shortly after I wrote it, but I’m not promising that I’ve finished messing with it.

The Posts listing page will show an image if there’s one in the post folder, otherwise it is supposed to show some default placeholder image. I haven’t worked out how to do it programmatically yet, but I have a folder of generated images, and I link to one (at random) in the YAML header of the post. They are mostly tiling, generated by the late lamented StarfishX which hasn’t worked since Macs used Intel processors.

Hmmm… I sense a project

I also got some inspiration from Silvia Canelón’s personal site, primarily for my home page and about.

Content Stuff

I considered creating a Galleries listing page and bringing over my existing galleries. What I did instead is simply turned a few of them into posts. I may or may not bring some more in. I also brought over a couple of posts from the old site just because I like them.

I’m anticipating more posts, likely trailing off as I get serious about job-hunting. There will be some “professional” ones as well as puzzle brags, and maybe some learning-in-public. We’ll see how this goes.

I’ve also added an RSS feed (I hope to be able to exclude the Puzzles category if I can because who wants that), and I’m considering comments but that may be a while.

screen capture of the landing page to the site. The 'Recent Posts' section is all squished to the left column

Edited to add: I need to fix the landing page, but I need to get this uploaded. Work for another day!