Projects · This site
A research-communication platform
Modern tooling instead of a stack of LaTeX PDFs. A paper here can carry live charts and real math alongside the prose, and the whole thing stays under my control. The site is one of the projects in its own right.
Design process
The current design wasn't the first idea. It came out of about twenty previews, each taking the same content in a different direction. Building them was how I worked out what the site was actually for. A few of them:
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Front Page
A broadsheet front page in cream and serif, the research run as the day's lead story.
View live -
Vector Field
The invisible hand, rendered: a dark starfield with the name set in a slow gradient.
View live -
Working Copy
A working paper with the margins left in, red-pen notes where the thinking happens.
View live -
The Record
A full newspaper of record: ruled columns and a "What's News" rail down the side.
View live -
The First Site
The previous live site, sealed as it shipped, under a dark markets palette and a yield-curve hero.
View live
Previews open as enlarged images; “View live” opens the design in a new tab.
Stack
PHP, no framework
Hand-written PHP with a small set of shared utilities. The whole request path is legible: no framework magic between a URL and the markup.
MariaDB
Posts and research codebases live in MariaDB as markdown source plus a rendered cache, addressed by slug and gated by a draft/published state.
nginx + Docker
nginx serves and routes with a strict security-header and CSP policy; Docker Compose ties the services together identically in dev and production.
A custom renderer
A markdown pipeline that also handles live chart embeds and LaTeX, the reason a research paper can be a web page here, not a PDF.
It isn't WordPress because I wanted to publish research, not run a CMS. Reproducible charts, real math, and citable permalinks are awkward to bolt onto a plugin stack, and straightforward once the platform is my own.
What I learned
Mostly that taste is subtraction. Most of the twenty previews failed by adding too much color and motion, and the one that shipped worked by staying out of the reader's way. Owning the stack has a real cost: TLS, backups, and security headers are all my problem now. For a platform I can bend to the research, that's worth it.
The platform underneath is documented in research infrastructure.