taylor.town (previously taysar.com) is a public place for organizing my thoughts.
Everything for the site (including the text) can be found on GitHub.
This site is served via CloudFlare Pages. My custom build-script is written in Elixir and can be found here. The Earmark Markdown Parser is really high-quality.
The design and typography steals heavily from tufte-css.
I use tinyletter.com for my e-mail newsletter.
Thanks for visiting.
2022.01.25
-- Create an HTML file in a newsletter archive directory.
-- One essay in full; many essays in a table.
-- Share common styling file with build.exs.
mix run newsletter.exs essays/1.md ...
2022.01.19
I’d like to put an “I am X days old” counter somewhere on the website.
2022.01.17
The images and video embeds don’t load right away – I want to add a colored background for media to show the loading space.
2022.01.17
It would be cool to publish all my new music finds in a monthly newsletter.
2022.01.17
I absolutely adore this “hi” page on sonnet.io.
I really really want to copy it 🙃
2022.01.17
Some new tasks:
-
add region to taylor.town in Yandex Webmaster
-
title tag is missing on many pages?
-
implement description tag
-
CSS broken on taylor.town project page (allows right scroll on mobile)
-
btc donations
2022.01.10
I want to make a logo at some point.
2022.01.10
This little script was incredibly helpful for tracking down original dates for essays:
for i in essays/* ; do echo "$i : $(git log --follow --format=%aD $i | tail -1)" ; done | less
2022.01.09
I’d like to branch out some of the more important pages into mini-sites like howcomplexsystems.fail. But I don’t think there are any good candidates for mini-sites yet.
2022.01.05
I would love to create a script that automatically downloads and populates all the album artwork for my music list. I guess that would be a lot to load at once – so maybe just a grid of 5-star albums?
2022.01.05
I just added favicons and icons and I think the iOS one needs some padding.
2022.01.05
I think the category pages should be separated into “recent” (which uses the updated
field) and “all” sections.
2022.01.05
I finally found the perfect e-mail newsletter service for my site: tinyletter.
When I’m ready to officially start sending monthly emails, I just need to run the following on the first of each month and summarize everything:
git diff HEAD '@{1 month ago}'
2022.01.04
Updated task-list:
-
sitemap.xml(?) and robots.txt
-
concatenate index files like “essays/index.md” to the top of the auto-generated directory indexes; it would be nice to have a “selected works” section
-
implement more features from https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css/blob/gh-pages/tufte.css
-
improve blockquotes
-
find links on hn and reddit and add links to header of each essay
-
copy footer from here: https://calpaterson.com/against-database-teardown.html
-
integrate “last-edited” dates from github in directories and page details
-
monthly email reading list
-
add timestamps to selected essays like danluu
-
reorganize: videos, writing (essays, stories), music, software, hardware, photography, studies, else (hello, contact, favorites)
-
how do i make the site last 100 years?
-
implement article tags/categories
-
look at gwern resources
-
seo
2022.01.04
Well, renaming everything was significantly harder than I expected. Here is the script I used:
for x in * ; do x=${x%.*}; if ! grep -q "is_published" "$x.md"; then echo "---\ntitle: $(echo "$x" | sed 's/.*/\u&/')\nis_published: false\nredirects:\ntags:\ncreated:\nupdated:\n---\n\n$(cat "$x.md")" >! "$x".md ; fi ; y=$(echo $x | tr -dc '[:alnum:] -' | tr -d ",'\"" | tr '&' 'and' | tr ' ' '-' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]').md ; mv "$x.md" "$y.new"; mv "$y.new" "$y" ; done
2022.01.04
When I’m ready, I think I can use the following script on the files to make better links:
for x in * ; do
mv "$x" $(echo "$x" | tr -dc '[:alnum:] -.' | tr ' ' '-' | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
done
2022.01.04
Okay, I finished implementing the headers, but I still need to rename the file names to “permanent” names, which is going to be quite a chore.
I’ll also need to implement the redirects
, tags
, created
, and updated
fields into the UI.
2022.01.04
One change I want to make: I think the filenames should be short permanent links (the filename in the repo), while the link title is metadata that is stored in a YAML header.
Each YAML header can look something like this:
---
title: The Problem with Podcasts
redirects: /essays/The%20Problem%20with%20Podcasts
tags: essays, media, consumption, podcasts, audiobooks
created: 2022.01.01
updated: 2022.01.01
is_published: true
---
# The Problem with Podcasts
...
Making this change actually solves a major problem: if no YAML header is found, then the essay is not published! This means I can slowly add things to the site by adding the proper YAML headers.
I can use a quick script to add initial headers for everything in the “Selected Essays” section.
2022.01.03
Here’s an updated task-list:
-
concatenate index files like “essays/index.md” to the top of the auto-generated directory indexes; it would be nice to have a “selected works” section
-
cloudflare
dist/_redirects
-
implement more features from https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css/blob/gh-pages/tufte.css
-
improve blockquotes
-
find links on hn and reddit and add links to header of each essay
-
copy footer from here: https://calpaterson.com/against-database-teardown.html
-
sitemap.xml(?) and robots.txt
-
integrate “last-edited” dates from github in directories and page details
-
article metadata (create/update dates, tags, redirects, short url)
2021.12.14
Here’s my current todo list for the site:
-
monthly email reading list
-
add timestamps to selected essays like danluu
-
marked package in build.js doesn’t work – consider moving to elixir or another lang instead
-
reorganize: videos, writing (essays, stories), music, software, hardware, photography, studies, else (hello, contact, favorites)
-
look at gwern resources
-
/sitemaps/sitemap1.xml
-
seo
-
styling
-
nice fonts
-
max-width
-
general styling
-
emoji menu
-
all links should have hover/previews/annotations (wiki, taysar, (pdf, csv, etc))
-
how do i make the site last 100 years?
-
article tags/categories
-
gzip/compression
Inspiration! Cool minimalist websites: