Published on 2026-02-03
Tags: changelog, static-site

Like tags, which group different blog posts together, series now have dedicated pages where all the constituent blog posts are listed.

The All Series page lists all series, like the Knowledge Bases Tool series.

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Published on 2026-01-01
Tags: article, git, meta, ocaml, static-site

For 2024's New Year's resolution I decided I'd finally build and publish a personal website. That I'd write up my thoughts on the articles I was reading and post them instead of dumping them on friends 😆. In review, I'm happy to say I succeeded.

I wrote and published 164 blog posts over the past year, not counting this post. September was my most prolific month. I initialized the OCaml project that became the static site generator in late January, writing a test post at the beginning of February to work out frontmatter parsing, markdown generation, and my custom templating language. The first "real" post came at the end of June, a few days after I bought the domain name.

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Published on 2025-12-02
Tags: changelog, ocaml, static-site

I've created individual image pages. Now all images will link to their own image page, which makes it easier to see the alt text and variant images. For example, this page for the picture of my dog on Rialto Beach.

Implementing this was pretty straightforward. My static site generator makes a distinction between "normal" pages, ones where the Page structure is constructible solely from the contents of a file (HTML or Markdown body with all the necessary metadata in a YAML frontmatter), and "synthetic" pages, where the Page structure is constructed in OCaml code inside the generator. These image pages are synthetic: the generator constructs one for each image original used on the site, generated alongside other synthetic pages like the tag pages or blog post archive pages.

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Published on 2025-10-09
Tags: changelog, photography, static-site

I've created a Photos page to show off the photography-tagged posts in a gallery format.

It didn't take much coding work to build, just adding on a "thumb" mode to the image builtin. The majority of the work was achievable with pre-existing template builtins:

<main>
  <section>
  <h1>Photos</h1>
  <div class="gallery">
    {setlist(posts, contains(item.md.tags, photography))/}
    {foreach(posts, post)/}
      {if(post.md.thumbnail)/}
      <a href="{pageurl(post.md.slug)}">
        {img(post.md.thumbnail, thumb)}
      </a>
      {/if}
    {/foreach}
    {/setlist}
  </div>
  </section>
</main>

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Published on 2025-09-24
Tags: changelog, static-site

I've finally built support for images! It's taken about 2 months to finish implementation — I started during my vacation in early August and have been working on it when I find the time and motivation. I'll write up a larger post detailing the full system later, suffice it to say I'm generating multiple encodings (JPEG, WEBP, AVIF) at multiple resolutions (400px, 720px, 1440px) so I can minimize bandwidth usage and enable the user's browser to select the image which fits best (<picture>).

To kick things off, here's a picture of my dog Ki at the dog park:

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Published on 2025-09-15
Tags: amazon, art, commentary, rss, software-eng, static-site

My count of RSS feeds as of this writing is a whopping 340. A lot of them haven't had an update in a year or more. Some are dead (I should develop a method for cleaning them up). However, one of the benefits of my laziness is sometimes a non-updating feed updates! Like today's post on Necropolis, a webcomic I haven't seen update since 2020. The author's been busy being a professional animator and producer.

Jake Wyatt on 2025-09-14:

Getting to make cartoons with so many talented people has been a huge, all-consuming privilege. It’s taken me five years on the job just to get my legs under me, just to begin to feel that I know what I’m doing. It’s taken everything I have just to keep my head above water, to get something resembling our crew’s talent and effort and intention onto the screen. For that entire half-decade I have longed to make comics, to write stories for myself, to draw for myself. But there was always something that needed doing.

Recently I’ve realized that denying that part of myself, telling it to wait its turn through one more script revision, one more review, one more retake, one more episode, one more season–it’s taken a toll that I can no longer afford to pay. I don’t think I can keep going unless I take some time to write and draw and explore outside of the studio production system. As we fight through post on the third season of My Adventures With Superman and start writing the first season of Lantern, I’m looking for ways to work and lead that will get me some of that time back–and my teams are really coming through for me.

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Published on 2025-09-13
Tags: changelog, static-site

A page breaking down my blog posts by year and then month, to enable easy browsing of the whole archive, is now available: Blog Archives.

Now that I've hit over 50 posts, I thought it was time to build an archive scheme that won't just be an infinitely growing page. Pages for each year a post happened are generated, filtered down to contain only the posts from that year, and further grouped by month. In the process, the blog nav has been standardized and put on the tags and search pages.

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Published on 2025-09-08
Tags: changelog, rss, static-site

You can now subscribe to posts of a specific tag. The existing "all posts" feed remains, and now there is a feed for every tag that "contains" at least 5 posts. For example:

• Articles
• Music I'm Listening To
• Software Engineering
• Static Site Posts

The tag page (e.g. static-site) links to the feed on the page, as well as sets the feed meta tag — so you can paste the tag page URL or the tag feed URL into your feed reader of choice.

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Published on 2025-08-26
Tags: commentary, html, static-site

Alexander Petros on Unplanned Obsolescence on 2024-07-16:

Every day I ride the New York City Subway. For my carrier, most of the stops have cell service, and most of the tunnels between stops do not. When I read web pages while riding, I am keenly aware that if I click a link while I don’t have service, not only will the page fail to load, I will probably also lose access to the one I’m currently reading. Everyone who uses a web browser understands this behavior on some level. So I avoid clicking links until I’m at a stop.

I use the subway as an example to highlight that managing unreliable internet is a daily occurrence even in the most urban environments. Naturally, this concern is magnified in rural areas, which is why I'm deeply skeptical of the claim that SPAs somehow benefit people with slow or unstable internet connections.

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Published on 2025-08-10
Tags: article, java, javascript, ocaml, static-site

I like the idea of having search for my blog, to help readers find anything related to a specific topic, or something they'd read in the past. How do I make something as dynamic as search, but statically generated?

Requirements

• The solution has to be small — part of my purpose in statically generating the site is to make it fast to download, fast to view. Whatever is chosen needs to maintain that vision.
• The solution can't introduce too many dependencies — I really like OCaml as a language, and I used building my personal site as an excuse to work in it. Introducing non-OCaml dependencies has to be done with care, as I don't want to maintain a Rube Goldberg machine for my website.

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Published on 2025-08-06
Tags: article, css, html, javascript, static-site

Unfortunately I spoke too soon when I wrote the Building this Site post. I had a plan in place to use hilite, along with TextMate grammars and themes pulled from Shiki (which in turn gets its grammars and themes from TextMate/VSCode), but it fell through.

The Plan

The plan was to grab lightmode and darkmode themes from Shiki's trove of themes, stripping out any extraneous styles (a lot of text-editor-specific colors are given) to arrive at two sets of colors for pre-determined class names. Shiki works similarly to hilite: during processing it tags portions of the source code with CSS tags derived from the grammars. All of the TextMate grammars employed by Shiki use a consistent naming scheme, ensuring themes always line up with the grammars, resulting in colored text. With a little adjustment of the theme CSS tags to account for any differences between Hilite's and Shiki's tagging, I'd have ahead-of-time syntax highlighting, with as many supported languages as VSCode.

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Published on 2025-07-25
Tags: article, html, static-site

I learned recently that web browsers will execute an HTTP request for each <script> tag they find in the document. I hadn't really thought much about it, assuming a kind of declarative interpretation of HTML, where when multiple <script src="foo.js"></script> show up in the document, only one would be requested and executed. Turns out my assumption is wrong and the browser will happily request the same script multiple times. It's not much of an issue in practice, on subsequent page loads the browser will hit its local cache for every script load.

I have a number of "builtins", invokable functions, in the site's templating language. For example, date which parses and calculates date formats:

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Published on 2025-07-18
Tags: article, software-eng, static-site

This website is created with a hand-rolled static site generator. In this series I'll talk about some of the infrastructure I've built towards making the website.

Infrastructure

My static site generator asite, is primarily programmed in OCaml, using Dune and OPAM for the build system. The templating language used is custom, as is the majority of steps in the site building process. I do use a number of external packages:

• cmarkit — blog posts are written in markdown, asite uses cmarkit to render the markdown into HTML.
• hilite — for code syntax highlighting, though this isn't a complete solution, more on this in future posts.
• js_of_ocaml, search — used in building the search page, more on this in the future.
• markup — when generating rss, markup is used to parse and process a blog post's HTML into just a teaser, to keep the size of the rss file small.
• subprocess — used to invoke esbuild as a step in the build process, more on this in future posts.
• yaml — blog posts and other pages have a YAML frontmatter containing "columns" in the "post database".
• alcotest, cmdliner, logs, re, timedesc, and yojson — miscellaneous low level utilities used all over the place.

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