About Arrow
In September of 2024, I came across Bradley Taunt’s wruby project. It’s a single-file static site generator written in Ruby.
I initially reacted to finding this awesome project by writing about it on the blog I hosted on my Github profile. That website served two purposes. It was a sort of commonplace book for my notes and thoughts about web development as well as a place to share programming lessons and project handouts for my students. For those lessons, I needed a theme that favored readability and accessibility over anything else, and the initial design on Taunt’s website seemed great for this.
I cloned the project and began rewriting the CSS, but I wasn’t ready to leave Jekyll behind, as I relied on Github Pages for my hosting. While I couldn’t adopt the single-file static site generator, I figured the next best thing would be to optimize the theme so it worked with Jekyll. But I didn’t get to doing that until several months later. All of that time is now contained within commit messages scattered across various web design projects, and that’s just not as fun as reading actual blog posts. So it was time to write a simple, final theme where the focus was on clean readable code as well as universally accessible output.
I called this project Arrow to emphasize its focus: a direct conversion from Markdown to HTML, with the addition of some nifty utility classes to support some of the idiosyncrasies I’ve come to adopt while blogging with Markdown, such as relying on TextMate’s snippets to insert HTML elements like timestamps for paragraphs as I write.
I’m hoping this theme will allow other developer-writers to spend more time writing instead of tweaking and maintaining their websites. Don’t get me wrong— it’s extremely fun to rework my personal website’s design time and time again. But this website isn’t really my personal website, it’s a commonplace book, and for that I need a bit more formality.
I hope others will find Taunt’s initial work and my additions helpful for their own projects.
If you have any suggestions, requests, or would like to contribute to the development of the theme, feel free to send me an email or check out the source code on Github.
—Pablo