~hedy's site

This is my website and gemini capsule source code. Link is currently home.hedy.dev on both web and gemini.

philosophy

architecture

• remain a static site, without any javascript unless absolutely necessary (ie, if the chosen solution (say, with SSR or JS) is the best option with minimal trade-offs, adopting principles of Digital Minimalism, also see use boring technology).
• serving of content should be performant, there is no application logic or related bottlenecks.
• use minimal and maintainable CSS and HTML templates.

design

• no user-tracking or analytics whatsoever, for both WWW and gemini, unless it's minimal and privacy-respecting
• I might not be able to adhere to the strictest accessibility standards, but the WWW site should designed with accessibility in mind -- such as avoiding low-contrast and small text, or abusing element semantics
• it should support open standards, screen readers, and reader mode to the best balance between aesthetics, maintability and compliance.
• for WWW: design to look decent (usable) in most TUI browsers (that I know of, and can test)
• for gemini: stick to providing content and avoid using hacks or text formatting outside of preformatted blocks to design with both constant width clients and variable width clients in mind.
• good support for common screen sizes
• for WWW: minimal custom color scheme, especially for dark mode. enough to provide semantics and a light touch of "branding", though.
• all this does not in anyway the lack of personality or the 'personal website' quirky feel of it all! should definitely be less afraid of introducing changes like that in addition to the blinking underscore on the front page.

features

It has a blog and a few pages. The blog has mostly the same post for web/gemini.

WWW provides both an atom feed and an RSS feed whilst gemini provides a standard gemini atom feed.

Tags, last modification dates and changelog links are implemented. but may not currently provide public-facing direct links per-post.

Comments currently run through email and and a mailing list, with links to external discussions (if any) in each post.

A dynamic or pre-fetched comment system is not currently planned for both WWW and gemini.

Webmentions and pingbacks and supported using hosted -aaS links though I plan to switch to self-hosted solutions in the future, such as a lightweight CGI implementation.

That's about it! Nothing fancy. The CSS is pretty minimal, but not a brutalist design. It has a few custom colors, a sans-serif font stack, and some styling in the footer and nav. Everything else is partially based on top of simple css and sometimes seirdy's site.

requirements

build

• hugo - generate files

• rsync - separate HTML & gemini files into dedicated destinations perhaps I'll just switch to plain copying in the future. This was a relic of the old deployment system where I kept some extra files (such as CGI scripts) in the destination which should not be deleted.

  what this means is that I'll have to do rm -rf DEST/* periodically to clean up old files

• python3 - postprocessing on the gemini files

• prettier - format HTML files this requires my template HTMl files not rely on newline for spacing.

  to test, simply remove the prettier command from Makefile, run make gen && mkdir public2 && cp -r public public2 and run prettier on public2, make sure everything in public2 looks the same as public.

deploy

• hut - publishes HTML/gemini files to srht.site

lint

• pnpm - install dev dependencies in package.json
• ruby (>= 2.7 for htmlproofer)

hardcoded values

resources

In WWW, posts' resources are stored under the same directory as the post:

• /posts/my-slug/index.html (the post itself)
• /posts/my-slug/resource-1.png
• /posts/my-slug/resource-2.svg

In gemini, posts' resources are stored together under a separate folder:

• /posts/my-slug.gmi (the post itself)
• /posts/assets/my-slug_resource-1.png
• /posts/assets/my-slug_resource-2.png

These files might need to be changed to customize this:

• bin/gemini-clean.py
• layouts/shortcodes/get-resource-link.*

todo

• let gemini version also have a post page at /posts/index.gmi
• lint
• provide atom feed for www
• show post description in list
• proper reply via email link
• better a11y
• minify images and use WebP

Workflows

posts

bin/post

resources should be put in the same directory as the post. Link to them within markdown ad gemini files using the get-resource-link.{gmi|html} shortcode which returns the relative permalink of the file. (see resources.)

deploy

make all deploy