I wanted to rebuild this site to be… better. The old version had grown from a pretty cool thing I built from scratch (that worked quite a lot like Jekyll) into a thing that was trying to be Jekyll, but was failing.

I decided to stand on the shoulders of giants, and just use Jekyll. Ta-da!

Info

Info (I’ll spare you the Github link) was good because it could sync with a folder in Dropbox, bringing in newer files and getting rid of deleted ones. At the time (~2013) it seemed like a really good way to be able to update my site from anywhere.

It read Markdown files, wrapped them in flexible templates, connected everything together, had caching, all sorts of things. It was fun while it lasted. Anyway.

Jekyll and AI

I started playing with Jekyll around the same time I started playing with Cursor, and it was a great moment. I shared the Info codebase, explained that I wanted to use Jekyll to build a similar site, and… in about 2 minutes… I had a basic version up and running.

Then I saw that I could do anything.

So I imported a load of old blog posts, added Jekyll-friendly YAML metadata, and then had fun designing ways to explore the site.

  • /things/about/:tag shows… you get the idea
I had to get AI to help me to write a plugin that could write all the index pages, because that URL structure isn't built into Jekyll. Took a few tries, but it seems to work OK. I played with lots of other things, but realised it was overkill.