Michael Bergin

Notes on starting a writing archive

1 min readmeta

I have wanted a single, durable place for my writing for a long time. Not a platform that can disappear, reorder itself, or wrap my words in an interface I did not choose—just plain text, versioned in git, rendered simply.

This is that place. It borrows its sensibility from a few sites I admire: the plainness of Paul Graham's essays, the density and rigor of Gwern, and the range of Astral Codex Ten.

How it works#

Every essay is a Markdown file in content/essays/. Frontmatter carries the title, date, and summary:

---
title: The title of the piece
date: 2019-04-12
summary: One sentence for the index.
tags: [systems, notes]
---

Because the date is just a field, I can migrate old writing and backdate it to when it was actually written. The index groups everything by year, newest first.

What renders#

The pipeline supports the things technical writing tends to need:

  • GitHub-flavored Markdown—tables, task lists, strikethrough.
  • Syntax-highlighted code blocks.
  • Footnotes.1
  • Math via KaTeX, using $$…$$ (bare $ is left alone, so prices like $20 render normally):
∫−∞∞e−x2 dx=π\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2}\,dx = \sqrt{\pi}

That is the whole system. Text in, essays out.

Footnotes#

  1. Like this one—handled automatically by remark-gfm. ↩