"Life is a constant struggle between having a personal website and being happy with your personal website"
— Anonymous
I have long dreamed of having a place on the internet to call home; a place where I can share my work; a place where I can write. This is it. Welcome to the 34th iteration of Azlen's magnificent personal website, the I'm-actually-going-to-write-on-it-this-time-edition. My last website had too complex a build system that pulled data from both Notion and Roam which eventually led to my negligence to actually update the site with new information for over a year and a half (!). Not this time. This time is different, but of course, that's what I always say.
I tend to put a lot of thought into designing a website for myself, it is part of my identity, it is the digital side of me. As such I try to implement features that will make me enjoy my own website, or use it as a platform for experiments in designing internet spaces. So without further ado:
I love being able to go on little tangents, or placing references on a page. I've been dreaming of putting footnotes on my website for time immemorial. Well, they're more like rib-notes because they don't go at the bottom of the document but rather appear just to the side of the text.
I adopted the 100 Rabbits-style theme support inspired by @oilandsugar's post on the merveilles mastodon community. This means that the website can be themed with any colors you want simply by dragging an SVG file onto my website!
I want to invite you into my website as one invites someone into their home — because that's what it is, my digital home! So I've been experimenting with a friendlier, more conversational tone, And so far, I like it a lot!
I thought it might be funny to invent a new error code block to add a little human element to errors, for example: "Error 703: Not Written Yet" might appear on certain pages that I've linked to but not yet written any content for.
Of course, it's not done yet. Never will be. These are some features I think would be pretty neat to have, if I get around to implementing them sometime:
- Bring back chladni patterns on internal links
- Some kind of indication of external links
- List of backlinks to a particular page to aid exploration
- Table of contents in left sidebar for longer posts and articles
- Automatic checking for dead or broken links
- Commenting functionality
After you install ruby & jekyll:
bundle install
brew install pandoc
brew install jez/formulae/pandoc-sidenote
bundle add webrick
Oh and also you need to make sure _site is part of the deploy repository otherwise you'll get stuck in an infinite loop...