How to Make a Blog Like This

This blog follows the Documentation as Code ethos.

• Create an account on GitHub
• Write articles in Markdown
• Learn Git Fundamentals
• Use Git
• Use GitHub Pages and Actions to Deploy mdBook
  • My Deploy script on GitHub

There is some AI use here, the articles are 98% human written.

I use Anthropic’s tools

Where LLMs are used

• OCR tasks
  • Diagram-to-Code tasks
• Reforming tables
• Lint
• Spelling and grammar
• Finding potential technical errors
• Rubber Ducking
• Vibe Coding
• Debugging
• Lab Implementation

Where LLMs are never used

• Lab Design
• Note Taking
• Prose
• Technical Writing

Preprocessors

mdBook is used to turn CommonMark into html.

These tools extend the html features, typically with JavaScript.

Mermaid

• Turns text into diagrams
• Allows version control for diagrams
• SVG Adaptive
  • Resize Nicely
  • Light and Dark theme adaptive

Mermaid is a binary js file that gets copied to the root of the repo.

curl -sL https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid@11.5.0/dist/mermaid.min.js -o mermaid.min.js

Then mdbook needs to be rebuilt:

mdbook build

SVGBOB

• Sometimes
• Converts ASCII Art to a SVG
• It does this on build

gitinfo

• Injects Git Metadata into the rendered HTML articles
  • Commit
  • Date of Commit
  • Link to Commit

… Onto every webpage

Editable Extras

Is a tiny js file that modifies book.js to allow editing console examples directly on the webpage.

This lives in the root of the repo.