salnad.me

aka a colophon.

tech

created with Astro, and a custom template.

style

• font used is ComicMono.
• all words are lower-cased, unless they are proper nouns
• each page includes a haiku (usually at the end)
• be concise, direct, curious, and light-hearted

creation process

content created in Markdown in my local “second brain” equivalent. the structure roughly matches the 4 main views listed in organization, with an additional time directory that stores daily entries.

for most types of tokens created here, i try to capture as much as i can, and when possible, add to this website.

for trail, i’m attempting to be more rigorous. i’m experimenting with using llms to enhance my writing process.

• i’ll bookmark things into my reading-list (via safari), and take brief notes after reading something
• as soon as possible, i’ll download and gather the content of what i read as text into a file (for podcasts, speech-to-text, for websites, page-source or pdfs, for books, highlights or bookmarks)
• i’ll pass it into a model (usually via simonwillison’s llm tool) to process into a transcript
• i’ll query the processed transcript to find quotes related to ideas or questions that came up as i consumed the content
• i combine these quotes + my own notes to create the trail
• i use an llm to crtiicize based on a list of criterion i have for “good” posts which means following my style

my goal is to strike a balance with effeciency (capturing something is better than nothing) and ensuring the key parts of the writing process are left to me so that i actually distill the content being consumed. this process is a work in progress

organization

content is organized under:

• things — a page for projects and specs for creations of mine. things that are more than “just” textual content. they’re meant to be viewed or interacted with
• thoughts — long form, original essays. they are meant to communicate thoughts that feel novel to me
• trail — my version of a “linkblog”. a place to store my notes on things i’ve consumed

features

• tags — clicking on a tag (i.e. #meta) allows you to see all posts that have to do with the tag specificed

purpose

writing is good. writing things that i want to remember is good. sharing things is good. sharing things to an audience (even if its just a future version of me) forces me to hone my ideas into substantitive things. writing centers my attention. having a place to look at my creation makes me feel excited and proud.

backlog

this is a list of things for the meta site that have yet to be implemented

• the ability to show posts via a date
• a 3d book shelf using 3D rendering libraries
• a “haiku” viewer that takes you too a random haiku i’ve created
• the ability to search (yikes)
• updating the “tags” to create a graph view that can be easily explored
• implementing a way to have my editing software to look more like my site