Source for lyndsysimon.com, built with Zensical. Content lives in src/, posts in src/posts/.

Add a Markdown file to src/posts/. It needs a date in the front matter, and the URL is derived from the post title unless a slug is given:

---
date: 2026-11-05
categories:
  - Software
slug: some_post   # optional; defaults to a slugified title
---

# Post title

The introduction, which is what shows up on the home page listing.

<!-- more -->

Everything after the `<!-- more -->` marker only appears on the post page.

The home page, /archive/, and /category/ are generated by the blog plugin — nothing has to be updated by hand. src/index.md is intentionally empty: it is the blog's entry point, so whatever it contains is printed above the newest post. The tags plugin is switched off and there is no /tags/ page; tags: in front matter is inert.

A fenced mermaid block is rendered to SVG by Pele, not Mermaid.js — Pele is ~270 kB gzipped against Mermaid's ~1.6 MB, has no dependencies, and themes from the site's CSS variables.

```mermaid
flowchart LR
  A[Start] --> B{Done?}
```

Pele is vendored at src/javascripts/pele.global.js (MIT, licence alongside it) and loaded lazily, so pages without a diagram never download it. The fence is emitted as <pre class="pele">; do not change that class to mermaid or Zensical's own handler starts fetching Mermaid from unpkg. A diagram Pele cannot parse falls back to showing its source as a code block.

• blog_dir = "." and post_url_format = "posts/{slug}" together are what keep post URLs at /posts/<slug>/. Zensical looks for posts in <blog_dir>/posts/, so changing blog_dir to posts makes it find nothing at all, and dropping the prefix from post_url_format moves every post to /<slug>/. Both break published links.
• Posts with a slug use it verbatim, which is how the older posts kept their underscore URLs from the MkDocs days. New posts without a slug get a hyphenated URL derived from the title.

uv sync
uv run zensical serve -a 127.0.0.1:9124

Mission Control runs this as the "Blog" service on port 9124.

uv run zensical build
python3 scripts/postprocess.py site
python3 scripts/check_links.py site

scripts/postprocess.py is not optional. The blog plugin emits every heading in a listing as <h2><a class="toclink">…</a></h2>, which both makes the title look like a link and, inside a post excerpt, turns the post's own subheadings into links. The script moves the anchor out to a small link icon after the heading text. It is idempotent and matches on the toclink class, so an upstream markup change degrades to "headings are plain text" rather than breaking the build.

Pushing to main runs the same build in GitHub Actions and deploys to GitHub Pages.

• Set up RSS for the blog plugin
• Write a plugin (or contibute support to Pygments) for OpenSCAD