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Design Of This Website

Meta page describing krisyotam.com, the self-documenting website’s implementation, experiments, and technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.

status: In Progress
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certainty: certain
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importance: 10/10
DesignWebsiteKrisyotamcom
Filed under: website
krisyotam.com is a hybrid static, dynamic site using next.js, and currently hosted on vercel. The goals of this site differ slightly from other "blogs" and it is designed to be fast, practical, and aesthetically pleasing. So you won't tend to see large thumbnail images, frequent pop-ups, or pestering notifications to join a email list.

Development

The majority of the code for this site is written in TypeScript, with some components written in JavaScript. The site uses Next.js for server-side rendering and static site generation, and is styled using Tailwind CSS.

Developers

The site is primarily developed by Kris Yotam, with some major contributions from Ally Taffet, and Lydia Lorien. The site is closed source, and currently invite only, but we may release the source code in the future.

Design Principles

The goals of this site can be presented as a elegant refactor of gwerns question "What does it take to present, for the long-term, complex, highly-referenced, link-intensive, long-form text online as effectively as possible, while conserving the reader's time & attention?" as such

The goal of this site is to explore and implement the best methods for presenting complex, long-form, highly-referenced, and link-intensive writing online—optimized for long-term preservation and designed to conserve the reader’s time and attention.

One of the largest challenges of this site, and a critical barrier to law 8 was the lack of rigor in deciding what is "meaningful" and what is "obvious". Take for example my page for the Mitzvah, and Rules of the Internet. Implementing these with their own respective root level pages vs. as a much simpler mdx blog post was a difficult decision. For the mitzvah, I felt that the content was important enough to warrant its own page, but for something like "Rules of the Internet" their happen to be dozens of equally important sets of rules, laws, ect. that I can compile into lists to store for people to access. Going forward it would be much simpler to have these implemented as a mdx blog post. This is where the decision to create Hierarchical Content pages comes from, and why I have Essays, Blog Posts, and Notes.

LLM Digestion

What has been done, thought, written, or spoken is not culture; culture is only that fraction which is remembered.

– Gary Taylor

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Citation

Cited as:

Yotam, Kris. (Jun 2025). Design Of This Website. krisyotam.com. https://krisyotam.com/notes/website/design-of-this-website

Or

@article{yotam2025design-of-this-website,
  title   = "Design Of This Website",
  author  = "Yotam, Kris",
  journal = "krisyotam.com",
  year    = "2025",
  month   = "Jun",
  url     = "https://krisyotam.com/notes/website/design-of-this-website"
}