Colophon

This site is titled Iacobi Silvæ — “the Silvæ of Iacobus,” after Statius’s Silvae, the “woods” or gathering of occasional pieces that antiquity and the Renaissance used for a miscellany of writing. It is a commonplace book: essays, research, software, and shorter notes, kept in one place I control.

Sub rosa, the author signs himself Iacobus Goedelius Triobolos. Iacobus is the Latin of Tiago; Goedelius Latinises my mother’s name, Gödel; and Triobolos (Greek Τριώβολος, “worth three obols”) renders my father’s Tresoldi — tre soldi, three coins — into the older currency. A small humanist conceit, offered to whoever reads this far.

Built by hand

There is no framework here. The site is generated by a small Python script (build.py, a few hundred readable lines) that does one thing per file:

1. Pandoc converts Markdown to HTML — and gives me, for free, footnotes rendered as margin sidenotes, citations from a BibTeX file via --citeproc, self-contained MathML, and syntax highlighting.
2. Jinja2 wraps each fragment in a template.
3. The result is plain static HTML in _site/, deployed to GitHub Pages by GitHub Actions.

The whole thing is open on GitHub.

Type & colour

Set in ET Book — Edward Tufte’s Bembo-like face, with old-style figures — for reading, and Lato for interface furniture. The palette is iron-gall ink on vellum, with a manuscript rubric red used the way medieval scribes used it: for initials, marginal marks, and dividers. Both a light and a warmer “bistre” dark theme are provided; the page follows your system preference and remembers a manual override.

Independence

The site keeps its own copy of everything: self-hosted fonts, its own feeds (Atom and JSON), an h-card and rel="me" links so it can act as an identity hub, and a webmention endpoint for replies from the wider web. Small-web furniture — a now page, a uses page, a blogroll — comes with the territory.

Built in the open, in the spirit of the IndieWeb.