Some changes round here...
Posted: 1th May 2026.
You may have noticed that the design of the blog posts has significantly changed. This is due to a change in the underlying technology of the blog. I’m now using the Jekyll engine to build and maintain this site, rather than hand rolling it like I used to.
Why?
Why change how things were? After all, the older design with the tuftecss-based styling was really nice!
In short - time. In more words, every blog post (once written) would take me another three to four hours to modify to insert all the footnotes and sidenotes. As nice as the design was, it was time consuming and laborious. With Jekyll, I can take my Markdown files from Obsidian (where I write) and with minimal edits have a blog post. The hardest part is ensuring that I have the figures correctly inserted!
The old design was also inaccessible. I didn’t realise this, but the older design broke the moment you introduced a screen reader, as the reader would attempt to read the sidenotes as if they were part of the regular prose, completely breaking sentences and the flow. This is not acceptable. I strive for accessability and this bugged me greatly when I found out. To anyone who was affected, I am very sorry!
The Future
I will write up a longer article about this transition at some point. Jekyll is really cool but my goodness it took quite a bit of doing to get a dev environment working on my Mac. It also has a few small quirks that took some getting used to, however I’m very proud how this has all turned out.
Until next time, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you have a great day!