How this site is built

This site replaces a Jekyll blog I set up in 2022 and then stopped updating. I rebuilt it with Astro, which turns Markdown files into static HTML.

Writing and publishing

Posts and project summaries live in Markdown files. Their titles, dates, and other fields are checked during the build, so a missing description or an invalid date gets caught before publishing. The longer visual project pages also have JSON files for their text, captions, and charts.

A push to the main branch runs the checks and build in GitHub Actions, then publishes the output to GitHub Pages. I don’t upload the files by hand or run an application server for the site.

Astro writes directory pages such as blog/index.html. GitHub Pages can serve that file when someone visits /blog. A host that looks up files by their exact path would need a rewrite rule to add index.html.

The custom domain is configured in the repository’s Pages settings, with DNS pointing to GitHub Pages. The site configuration supplies the matching address for canonical links and the sitemap.

The moving Enter button

Fitts’s Revenge is the button on the home page that moves away from a mouse cursor. Tab and Enter let you through, and touch and pen work normally. I built it to let mouse users briefly experience an interface that gets in their way.

The button estimates where the cursor is heading and chooses a position from a 5×5 grid across the screen. It checks both the current and predicted cursor positions, since prediction alone can miss a fast approach. The project page explains that behavior in more detail.

Keyboard controls stay available, including in Safari, where the dialog handles its own focus cycle. Escape closes it, and a skip button appears after a few evasions. Reduced motion keeps the Enter button still. Without JavaScript, the page opens without the dialog.

Demos and other controls

JavaScript also runs the theme toggle, demo launchers, and interactive project demos. The site doesn’t send a client-side framework to the browser. Videos have playback controls, and the project pages explain which visuals come from the original work and which were made later to explain it.

The view counter is optional. A build setting supplies its endpoint; when that setting is empty, the site makes no counter request and hides the counts. If a request fails, the page still works.

One request fetches all the counts needed by a page, so a list of twenty posts doesn’t need twenty requests. Opening that list also doesn’t count as viewing every post it links to.