Hyperverses is a web site. Each page is compiled as HTML from markdown formatted plain text.
The bit that does the marshalling from markdown bits to a full-fledge HTML site is Astro. It’s not as constricted as blog software, but not as consuming as writing HTML by hand. I aim to build a website, not a blog. A blog has particular trappings such as calendar pages, a long scroll of a post-filled index page, categories. Sometimes comments. Hyperverses is just a series of linked pages, with the absolute minimum of navigation.
Using Astro to build the site gives me a playground to tinker in. Hyperverses explores textuality and digitality, and extending Astro to suit my own experimentations is very much a part of that.
This site eschews images when possible. I enjoy the written word more than video and the visual arts. I am not insensible to graphic design, however. I spent longer than I ought to have picking out fonts and tweaking the spacing and column width, among other things. The site is almost entirely set in Theano Old Style.
Links on Hyperverses hopefully flatter traditional paper highlighters with imitation. Unvisited links have a yellow background, and visited a blue. Hyperverses is also concerned with analog methods of producing and consuming the written word, so I felt this slight homage was warranted. It is my only nod to skeumorphism. In the interests of web accessibility, links are underlined.
While the site is not a blog, it ought to have an RSS feed. It does not. It will.
The site has footnotes. It does not yet have a navigational scheme of any real utility. A list of every page is not going to cut it.
While each update to the site is captured in a git repository, I do not yet have navigable versioning set up for individual lexia.
My go-to text editor is neovim. I cut my teeth on, and still get use out of, emacs. I sometimes use Visual Studio Code.
This site is a product of my sensibilities. In 2002 I ditched Windows in favor of Linux. I have primarily used Macs since 2011. I spend more time composing in vim than in web forms. I think plain text is a pretty neat idea. I dig footnotes1. I am pretty skeptical about hypertext, actually. I hate it when people redefine words. Reading means reading words, possibly with illustrations or inside of comics. (Unless you are visually impaired, in which case my personal taxonomy starts to totter.) I read way too much ftrain in college. When @eastgate noticed something I said on twitter, he disagreed with me. He is far more knowledgeable about hypertext than I. I am still learning. I will get things wrong. Heck, I am getting things wrong right now. Most of what I’ve written on this page should not be in a colophon. That’s just not what a colophon is for. You know, I’m not entirely sure what a colophon is for. I just added a book on colophons to my Amazon wish list. Maybe someday I will write a better colophon.
My best friend made fun of me the other day for reading a book on footnotes. ↩