About this site

This incarnation of scy.name was launched in November 2025. Before (since December 2022) it was a simple landing page providing links to my Mastodon and Codeberg profiles.

I also have a very old PHP-based website at scytale.name which I'm keeping alive, but haven't touched in years. I'd love to integrate it into this site at some point, but that's gonna be quite a bit of effort.

Setup

The content is authored in Markdown and converted into a static website using Material for MkDocs, which also provides the theme I'm using.

I hope to migrate to Zensical once it has blogging and plugin support.

Wonky stuff

Git dates vs. front matter

MkDocs-Material's blog plugin requires a creation date in each blog post's front matter, even when using the git-revision-date-localized plugin. For this reason I'll be setting creation and update dates manually, at least for now.

Also, last time I checked, git-revision-date-localized did not support ignoring specific commits from calculating the modification timestamp. This meant that if you performed some batch operations on files, every one of them would be shown as modified. However, this should now be possible since 1.4.0.

"Updated" date and the RSS plugin

The MkDocs RSS plugin is designed to check Git logs to determine when a page (or a blog post) has been created, and when it was updated. You can override this with front matter data and not use Git at all, but there's a catch: You then need to provide both a created and an updated date, else it will fall back to use build time instead.

Since I didn't want to use Git, but didn't want to duplicate the date in the front matter either, I instead went with generating the updated date using the Mkdocs-Macros plugin.

Feed GUIDs

By default, mkdocs-rss-plugin, which I'm using to generate the RSS feeds, is using each post's permalink as its GUID. However, that means that if I ever need to rename or move a page, feed readers will assume it's a new post (since its GUID changed).

Therefore, I'm using a modified version of the plugin that allows the GUID to be read from a page's YAML front matter, and check that each article in the feed indeed has a GUID (I'm using uuidgen -r) set manually. See the test target in the Makefile for the implementation.

I intend to upstream my changes to mkdocs-rss-plugin as soon as I find the time (#13).