Rebuilding This Notebook

This site has had a few lives. It started on WordPress. Then it moved to a static Eleventy build that never quite got finished. This is the third try, and the first one I'm actually happy with.

The idea

I wanted it to feel like the early-'90s Apple stuff I grew up around: beige and warm, a little playful, clearly made by a person. Not a replica of an old operating system, though.

My first mockup went full retro desktop, with fake menu bars, close boxes, and a little beige computer, and it was fun for about five minutes. Then it started to feel like a costume.

The version you're reading keeps the feeling and drops the costume:

• A pixel font for labels
• A warm serif for reading
• Cards with hard shadows
• A palette of wheat, deep slate, and blackberry

There's a dark mode too, for those late-night reading sessions.

Bringing the old posts home

The part I cared about most was not losing anything. There are 101 posts from the old versions, mostly PowerShell and endpoint management, plus a surprising number of breakfast recipes. Every one came over with its original date and wording.

Note

Old posts carry a small note saying they haven't been revised yet. As I update each one, the note comes off. It's an honest way to show a site that's still being cleaned up, instead of pretending all 101 posts are fresh.

Old links still work, too. Anything that used to live at an old address quietly redirects to its new home.

How it's built

• Eleventy turns Markdown files into plain HTML. No database, and nothing running on a server.
• Sveltia CMS gives me a writing interface in the browser that saves straight to GitHub.
• DigitalOcean rebuilds and publishes the site every time something changes. Push, wait a few minutes, done.
• Self-hosted fonts, because I learned the hard way that fonts installed on your computer aren't the same as fonts on the site.

What's next

Updating the old technical posts, one at a time. Some of those scripts lean on tools Microsoft has since retired, so each gets rewritten, tested, and given a proper write-up. Two are done.

There's also a Writing section waiting for chapters and songs, and a Uses page waiting for me to finally photograph my desk.

If you've read this far, thanks for stopping by. There's no algorithm here, just things worth writing down.