I’ve 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. This website is meant to be such a garden/museum/time sink, as a hodgepodge of notes, lists, and reviews, about books, articles, poems, movies, programming, art, and so on and so forth. That makes it sound rather grandiose and sophisticated, which it is definitely not.
Making a website is fundamentally an act of hubris; you have to think you have something other people would be interested in, and which is worth all the time and effort. Unwilling to admit this, I’ve neatly decided to sidestep the issue and claim that this website is made primarily for myself, as an easier and more coherent way of getting my notes wherever I am, which also conveniently allows me to (theoretically) set lower quality standards. We ignore the facts that I could do this without making it public, and that as a terminal tinkerer these ‘lower standards’ are nowhere to be found.
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.
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.
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. The favicon is a stylised representation of the pulsar map from the Pioneer Plaque (also the Voyager Golden Record). It’s been bloated to be visible at such a small scale, but the original looks like this, and I modified it from the Wikimedia version.
I’m a recent graduate who works in quantum information and computing.
That’s an interesting question! Actually, I can tell a decent amount about you. This is based on what your device is telling me, so it might be inaccurate or just wrong if you’re using a VPN, an adblock, or other privacy stuff (which you should! See my tips for some suggestions.)
I think…
…Didn’t I just tell you? You’re at my website, Marzchipane! Hope you enjoy!
I probably sent you the link, the number of people who know about this site is barely in the double digits. If you’re on a laptop, aaaa! I’m very happy you went to the effort! If you’re on mobile, I’m very sorry, the site definitely isn’t as optimised for mobile as it should be, but I’m working on that!
You asked, didn’t you?
Ah, that’ll be the concussion. You’ll remember soon enough!
Don’t be.
Although I said this site is mainly for me, secretly I want everyone on the planet to read it and to tell me, in blatant disregard of the evidence, how cool, funny, and sophisticated I am. In lieu of global domination, I’ll settle for a captive audience of one (1) fictive personality.
Yeah, sorry to break it to you.
‘He’s dreaming now,’ said Tweedledee: ‘and what do you think he’s dreaming about?’
Alice said ‘Nobody can guess that.’
‘Why, about YOU!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. ‘And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?’
`Where I am now, of course,’ said Alice.
‘Not you!’ Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!’
Everyone does.
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!
Did you not read that Through the Looking Glass quote up there? If I let you go, you’d dissolve into nothingness! You are a temporary shape I’ve imposed on the bubbling noosphere and if I relax the constraints of the exercise you vanish! Is that preferable to sitting there and listening to me?
I’m wounded.
python-markdown.