I had stored all the information available here, and a lot more besides, for a long time, before I thought of turning it into a website in 2022 or so. I stayed up with a couple of friends one summer night, and while they were working on their actual degrees, I decided to eschew mine and instead sketched out the first version of this site. It was flashy, with loads of cool fonts and animations, a dark mode toggle, and infinite scrolling, and it was absolutely useless because I couldn’t put any information into it, and it was as slow as hell. Then I let the idea marinate for a couple of years, making incremental upgrades to the data here and there, before I finally came back to the website and spun it all up in the course of a week or so in early December 2024.
I didn’t want to make it because I thought other people would find it at all useful or interesting, or even just not broken. It was mainly to make it easier for myself to find stuff I’d squirrelled away into any number of notes, lists, and folders. I’d also always loved the idea of carving out a little space on the internet for myself, decorating it, and making it inviting, with plenty of rabbit holes.
That’s quite a high bar to set, but of course any project like this is never really done. You set it up, you tinker and you modify and you fix, for as long as you’d like, and then if you get tired, you leave it be, and move on. Hopefully that’s a long while away, since I’ve tried to fully integrate updating it into my habits, but let’s see.
Currently it’s pretty bare-bones, with a few bucket lists, some of my favourite stuff, and personal reviews I’ve written about books and movies. I make no claims as to quality or effort! In the future, I’d like to add more stuff, like decoration, user customisability, interactive sheet music, recipes, and so on. Let’s see how it goes! My main inspirations in this have been gwern.net and satyrs.eu, both of which are gorgeously and precisely designed personal sites I would highly encourage you to gawk at. I’ve taken a lot of ideas from them (read: blatant unashamed copying) and lots of other sites, which you might find scattered around.
In the meantime, if you’re reading this, I’m very glad to have you here. Please do have a poke around, and if you know who I am, please do send on feedback, comments, or suggestions!
And finally, it’s called Marzchipane after one of my favourite artists, and a particular scene from The Amber Spyglass.
I’m a recent graduate who works in quantum information and computing, and in my spare time I like to buy books, add movies to my watchlist, and shiver because I’m always too cold.
My biggest issue making the website was yak-shaving: which framework to use, what languages, which data structures, how do I add information, where do I put it, and so on. In the end, it turned out to be a lot simpler than I’d thought. The key was making it easy to update, and I designed my workflow around that.
The first step is gathering information. I use Obsidian to keep notes, and it’s how I write my reviews, and some of the text pages. For the bucket lists and some of the favourites, I have a custom Python script which can take URLs, ISBNs, and IMDb links, and automagically fetches all the relevant information. If you look at how much stuff there is, you’ll see what a big time saver this is.
Then, I wrote a couple of HTML templates, and I use a second Python script to scrape up all my data, convert it to HTML, and store it in a separate repository, whence the website is served. For styling, I hand-wrote CSS (with a lot of trial and error). For the list search functionality, I used Github Copilot to write the Javascript. I wanted this website to be as hand-made as possible, but ultimately I’m not willing to waste that much time learning a language which I’d only use one-time for this website.
I did consider a lot of other options, including Flask, Eleventy or Jekyll, PHP, and so on, but ultimately I wanted to completely understand my website through-and-through, and to not be tied down to any one service or provider. This way, I own my website completely, and if the HTML/CSS/JS combination is no longer supported then there’ll be a lot bigger problems!