Info

Site Credits

I'd like to thank all the creators and developers whose work I'm building on here.

Tools

The site consists entirely of static pages created using the Jekyll Static Site Generator. Development work is carried out on my Mac Mini M4 Pro with a Studio Display while the build and test site hosting is carried out a Mini-PC running Pop!OS

As an IDE I use VSCode with the IdeaVim plugin and a colour theme that I can’t seem to settle on and changes every few weeks. (Vi was first editor I learned to use, some 40 years ago, and the muscle memory is too ingrained to change now!) I use the various tools provided by Affinity Software for image preparation and diagram creation.

The build system is the Linux ‘make’ command with some embedded bash scripts to do things like thumbnail generation.

The page theme is FEELING RESPONSIVE by phlow, although quite heavily modified. I’ve also used the Robroy lightbox.

Copyrights

All written content is my original work, unless otherwise stated and remains copyright Karl R. Wilcox 2025, 2026

For articles and general topic pages images, diagrams, photographs etc. are my own work unless otherwise stated.

For the reviews images are generally taken from the usual sources - amazon.com, imdb.com, youtube.com or the sites of the various studios or publishers. I haven’t provided individual attribution for these, sorry, but life is short and I’m sure that the organisations involved are big enough to handle the unintended copyright violations.

Hosting

As noted above, my Pop!OS Linux Mini-PC hosts multiple test versions of my various websites each on a different IP addresses.

The live website is hosted by UKHost4u on a Virtual Private Server. The site is entirely static, with just HTML, CSS, JavaScript and image files.

File Organisation

(The following information is largely for my own use and unlikely to very interesting to anyone else)

Articles

Created under blog/_posts, using the article template. Articles have no header image so add as required using ‘include figure’ in the body. You can provide a thumbnail with ‘thumb: file.jpg’ in the front matter, this will be looked for in /img/blog. A fall back is provided if required.

Reviews

Created in the reviews/<category>/_posts folder using the reviews template. Header image is added automatically based on the post slug, just put it in /img/reviews/<category>/ with a name that matches the slug and ends in .jpg. Thumbnails are generated automatically. A fall back image is provided if required.

The naming convention is that we use the full name of the item being reviewed using dashes instead of spaces but removing any initial “a-“ or “the-“. TV shows should have -sN appended, where N is the number of the season.

Frontmatter should be as follows:

Common properties

  • title: Item title without prefix (if any)
  • prefix: “A”, “An”, “The” etc.
  • subtitle: Any subtitle, as required
  • teaser: Whatever additional information you want to show near the top
  • picture: Override name of picture (taken from same img folder, if not present use slug)
  • layout: review
  • tags: as required

For Books

  • author: a key value, indexing authors.json
  • author2: ditto, use subtitle or teaser for even more authors and set author2 to “others”
  • series: Name (only) of whatever set of books this is from
  • booknum: Only used if series is set, number of the book in that series in reading order

For TV

  • season: number
  • network: source

For Movies

  • network: source

For Games

  • plaform: device

Other Pages

Created in an appropriately named folder in the root folder, you can have any organisation that you like and generally the permalinks will use that file organisation. You do need to provide your own navigation; either by manually including links or defining your own layout in _layouts or creating a custom sidebar in _data/sidebar.yml. Additionally you will need top level links to your new pages in _data/navigation.html, usually under ‘Projects’ or ‘Interests’.

Galleries

Two types of gallery are available, the Foundation style gallery that came with the theme, and should be used for a related set of images that do not require any titles or links, details of images are supplied in the front matter of the page containing the image.

There is also the RobRoy lightbox gallery that selects images from _data/artwork.yml according to various criteria and allows for titles, extended captions and links to more detail on other pages. See _includes/artwork for details.

All contents are automatically included in the search index.

Comments are disabled unless you put comments: true in the front matter of each page, or in the defaults section of the _config.yml file.