Weyland Joyner’s Blog (Quarto)

Site overview

  • Quarto website, output to docs/, hosted on GitHub Pages (custom domain may be configured)
  • Config: _quarto.yml (theme: cosmo)
  • Preview: quarto preview
  • Render: quarto render
  • Navbar tabs (in order): Writing, Bookshelf, Links, Language Learning, Resume/CV

Creating blog posts

Posts live in posts/<slug>/index.qmd. To add a new post:

  1. mkdir the directory posts/<kebab-case-slug>/
  2. Create posts/<kebab-case-slug>/index.qmd
  3. Use this frontmatter format:
---
title: "Post Title"
author: "Weyland Joyner"
date: "YYYY-MM-DD"
categories: [category1, category2]
---
  1. The user will often paste content from Apple Notes (sometimes with a screenshot). When they do:
    • Fix links: Apple Notes uses (text)[url] — convert to [text](url)
    • Em dashes: Use --- (three hyphens) for em dashes in Quarto
    • Bare URLs: Wrap in angle brackets: <https://example.com>
    • Emphasis: Use *italic* for emphasis where the note’s intent is clear
    • Blockquotes: Use > for quoted text
    • Footnotes: Use [^1] inline and [^1]: Footnote text at the bottom (note the colon)
    • Backdating: The user may ask to backdate a post; just set the date field accordingly
    • Don’t invent content: Preserve the user’s writing as-is; only fix formatting/links

Common tasks

  • Adding posts: Most frequent task. User pastes Apple Notes content, sometimes with a screenshot for reference. Fix the link syntax and formatting, create the post file.
  • Renaming posts: Just change the title field in frontmatter.
  • Committing/pushing: User will ask to commit and push. Use descriptive commit messages. The docs/ directory contains rendered HTML that changes with every quarto render/quarto preview, so file counts in commits will be larger than expected.
  • Nav changes: Edit _quarto.yml navbar section.

Existing categories

software, agents, ai, books, history, data, consulting, distributed-systems, writing, meta

Listing config

The homepage listing (index.qmd) uses fields: [date, title, author, categories, description] — images are excluded from the listing on purpose. The title field was removed from index.qmd frontmatter so no heading shows above the post list.

Prototype site

There is a prototype plain HTML/CSS version of this blog at ~/projects/weylandjoyner.com using the Flexoki color palette (calv.info-inspired). It has its own build system (node build.js with marked). The user may occasionally ask to add posts to both sites.