Star backgrounds are one of the most significant things on the web for me. When they started to disappear it was the first sign that the web was changing.

– Olia Lialina

This site is not meant to provide you with Erwartungskonformität; expect levels to decline as I move it further and further away from the Jekyll defaults1. You are not a user of this website. You are the audience of this website. You may not be the intended audience of this website.

Rest easy: I intend no monetization. I’m not trying to maximize your engagement. I have indicated to search engines and other crawlers that they should not index or scrape my site, so it’s all intentionally low-profile.

maya.land tech use philosophy

In the same way that one might ask “how would the Book of Kells have looked if Columban monks had had access to neon pigments”, I like to use contemporary CSS options as my means toward ends that are a little anachronistic.

I like writing text in Markdown, but I like that I can shove in chunks of HTML. It may not be Pure And Correct from a markup perspective, but it’s working nicely for me so far.

My goal is to use JavaScript only in ways that don’t require package management and build steps, because this is supposed to be fun for me goddamnit. I’ve made an exception for the JS that comes with Webmentiond (link below) because I think it’s such a stellar tool, and it’s deployed in a pretty self-contained way.

stuff I use

  • Webmentiond - this handles receipt and display of webmentions. (license GPLv3)
  • ruby-oembed (license MIT) for the proper oembeds and jekyll-linkpreview (license MIT) for the opengraph images
  • Jekyll - the Minima theme with my modifications (framework and theme: license MIT)
  • XP.css - if you haven’t run into it, don’t worry about it, when you do, you’ll know. (license MIT)
  • web-midi-player (license MIT) - click the gramophone wherever you see it, and wait a bit if nothing happens
  • GoatCounter - minimal analytics that seemed to respect privacy while satisfying my curiosity; if you have something like uBlock Origin installed it’ll be blocked
  • a truly horrifying amount of cron
  • this font (license CC-BY)

My webmentiond modifications are minimal, and, uh, available via email if you really want them, but they’re a bit hacky. If it were possible to relicense (it is not) I would be sharing them with a “learn from my mistakes” license.

Re:Jekyll, everything I’ve done is more on the creative-expressive side and, again, fairly minimal/hacky, so I’m not going to publish as a repo but if you have any questions about how anything is managed and want the liquid template stuff as an example, email me and I’m happy to send the relevant bits along.

I’ve set something up that creates per-page redirects to the equivalent pages here from https://mayaland.neocities.org/whatever/index.html. That lets people follow along from Neocities.

  1. Via Boris Müller ↩