fevnem.github.io — the Notebook

A personal site where the writing lives as plain markdown and is rendered in the browser by a markdown renderer that was written for it. No generator, no build step, no dependencies — the files in this repository are the site.

Live: fevnem.github.io

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About

This is the personal site of tri (fevnem) — python, go, js and backend work, mostly small self-contained things that can be read in an afternoon and run to the end.

It is a notebook rather than a portfolio: what I am building, the numbers behind it, and the parts that took longer than they should have. Six pages hold it —

• Index — what I work on now, and the most recent entries.
• Biodata — the person, as a chronology and a list of what I build.
• Projects — the repos that run, each linking to the code.
• Articles — the writing, one markdown file per entry.
• Uses — the bench, listed honestly.
• Contact — one channel, no forms.

The site is deliberately shaped like the software it describes: few moving parts, everything readable, nothing hidden behind a toolchain.

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The unusual parts

Three decisions shape the whole repository.

1. Articles are markdown, rendered in the browser. An entry is one .md file with front matter. js/md.js — about 6 KB, no dependencies — parses and renders it at read time. Nothing is pre-rendered, so there is no generated HTML to fall out of sync with the source.

2. Every entry has a real URL on any static host. a/<slug>.html is a tiny shell: js/site.js reads the slug from the path, fetches articles/<slug>.md, and renders it into the page. No server, no rewrite rules, no build — the same file works on GitHub Pages, any static host, or a plain http.server.

3. 404.html is also the router. A deep link like /a/thirty-eight-microseconds (served through the fallback on hosts that support it) resolves to the entry, and the page degrades to a tidy "no such entry" list when there is no slug. Without JavaScript, that fallback is still what you see.

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Files

Path	What it is
index.html · biodata.html · projects.html · articles.html · uses.html · contact.html	the six pages
404.html	the fallback path — dead end and router in one file
a/<slug>.html	one tiny stub per entry; the entry itself is markdown
articles/<slug>.md	the writing
articles/manifest.json	one object per entry, newest first
css/notebook.css	the entire look — paper, ruled stock, tabs, dark mode
js/md.js	the markdown renderer
js/site.js	routing, tabs, theme, entry loading
assets/favicon.svg	the one image, drawn in vectors
.github/workflows/deploy.yml	publishes the repository root to GitHub Pages

Total: 57 KB of files — ~11.6 KB of CSS and ~9.9 KB of JavaScript, the rest markup and prose.

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Writing an entry

1. Add the file — articles/<slug>.md, front matter then prose:

   ---
   title: Thirty-eight microseconds
   date: 2026-10-09
   summary: One line for the index.
   tags: [gps, relativity]
   minutes: 6
   draft: false
   ---

2. List it — add one object to articles/manifest.json, newest first. The index, tag filter and <title> all read from it.

3. Give it a URL — copy a/thirty-eight-microseconds.html to a/<slug>.html and change its <title> and <h1 class="entry-title">. That is the whole shell.

Nothing is compiled, installed or generated: no package.json, no bundler, no theme file, no plugin, no config.

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Markdown support

Headings, paragraphs, bold / italic / strike / inline code, links and images, nested and ordered lists, task lists, blockquotes, fenced code with a language class, indented code, pipe tables, horizontal rules, footnotes and hard breaks.

Raw HTML in a .md file is escaped and shown as text, never executed. The renderer uses an escape-then-tag pass: author characters are escaped before any tag is inserted, and link targets are neutralised (javascript:, data: → #), so a hostile markdown file cannot inject markup.

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Rules the site holds to

• Nav items are real pages — no same-page anchors anywhere in the navigation.
• Nothing is fetched from another origin — system font stacks, no images, no analytics, no third-party anything.
• Paper, not a dashboard — a ruled sheet with a red margin line in daylight; a warm desk lamp behind the reading column in dark mode. All CSS, no image files.
• Motion is optional — every animation is disabled under prefers-reduced-motion.
• Print-friendly — margins and tabs drop away, the prose stays.

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Local preview

python3 -m http.server 8140 --bind 127.0.0.1

Then open http://127.0.0.1:8140/. An entry lives at /a/<slug>.html, and articles.html?tag=gps filters the index by tag.

Deploying

A push to main is the deploy: .github/workflows/deploy.yml publishes the repository root with GitHub Pages. There is no build output — what is in the repository is what is served.

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Also on GitHub

• where-you-are — how GPS actually finds you, explained with hand-written WebGL2.
• unfinished-lives — a browser game about a bureaucratic afterlife, told in 32 cases.
• github-stats — contribution stats as a live SVG.

License

No LICENSE file — the writing here is personal, and the code is small enough to read. If you want to reuse a piece of it, ask first.