Hello World

This website’s a bit of a tech-experiment (stuff I play with here gets recycled into the main Wise Lich site), so don’t mind the jank; it’s part of the charm.

Stack-wise, this site is pretty simple: Astro, with Tailwind and a teeny tiny bit of React, hosted on Vercel. Most text longer than a paragraph is written as markdown. The only vaguely fancy thing I’ve done so far is set up some utility classes for container queries and fluid text.

On the design front, I’m also keeping things simple. Crisp edges, clear z-depth, simple color choices, clear content blocking — the goal here is a visual language that emphasizes composability.

Why? Because the end-goal is a content model that works for both blogging and graph-modeled documentation archives.

…What the hell is graph-modeled documentation?

Something I frequently kvetch about is how most documentation is rarely written in a way that lines up with how people read it.

Think about how people tend to read documentation — in a rush, narrowly searching for the solution to a specific problem, and then either moving laterally or zooming out to a broader problem-domain.

Even when documentation teams are on-point with their Diátaxis categories and learning-paths, the documentation they produce tends to be vaguely book-shaped. The hierarchy of topics is rarely invertible. The atomicity of the content is awkward. The pages might be organized into a tree, but that tree makes for a pretty shitty graph.

And that’s where graph-modeling comes in.

Graph-modeling boils down to taking page/chapter-oriented content and breaking it down into smaller, searchable, reusable, ‘nodes’ of data. If you’ve ever used personal-knowledgebase tools like Obsidian, you’ll have a pretty good idea of where this is going.

Good documentation should be like a database. You should be able to query it and construct views that facilitate specific goals.

And I’m using this site to hash out the bones of that for the main Wise Lich site.

Cheers.