After seeing Gwern's website[0], I immediately knew what design I wanted for my personal site [1]. Tufte's CSS package is much heavier than these three rules, but it achieves the same result: Content designed to maximize readability by removing distracting elements and respecting known typography rules.
Because I write with an overly-large number of asides, I fell in love with the Tufte-styled side/margin notes. The resulting text is much easier to read, since I'm not littering the paragraphs with em-dashes and lengthy parentheticals.
I hope more people rebel against the Medium-looking websites with massive images and huge blocknotes in 30px fonts that may or may not just be a line from the next paragraph or an important point to keep in mind when reading the next paragraph.
Lovely, but if you're making a big deal about quotes and pull-aways in your format, might I encourage you to use proper quotation marks — eg. “The” vs. "The"?
Thanks for pointing that out. I was under the impression that Pelican's Markdown parser automatically used typographic quotes vs straight quotes, but that's apparently not the case.
Ah, much more developed than I — I maintain a site that has a font similar to yours and I need to manually amend each and every typographic conceit. Not smart!
No worries! There's always room for improvement. Though my site now automatically swaps in [0] the correct typographic quotes (thanks again!), I still have to manually add <section>s and the HTML for the sidenotes, instead of using some kind of Markdown conceit that gets automatically translated when the site is compiled. :)
Your website is wonderful, I encourage you to share it more! I did some extensive preliminary research looking around at personal sites posted to HN and other places, and am now surprised I hadn't yet stumbled upon yours until now.
Thank you! Before making this I visited a bunch of personal sites / blogs that had been posted here, and surprisingly very few of them were similar in this regard. I may post about the websites that gave me inspiration in the future. (You may like https://legiblenews.com)
It feels very easy to read. So much clutter has been taken away.
There’s nothing pulling at the edges of your attention and ruining the experience. I quite like it.