Colophon
How this site is put together, for anyone curious or anyone who has to maintain it (me).
History
The first version of martinellis.me was a Jekyll site from 2014, built on an early Polymer release with a yellow scroll header and a PDF of my CV rendered into a canvas. It aged about as well as you’d expect, and the Wayback Machine never caught it, which is probably for the best.
Since then the site has been through a few versions, and the Internet Archive has snapshots of most of them:
- 2017: Hugo and Material Design. The earliest snapshot, from 29 July 2017, is already Hugo (0.18.1), dressed in Google’s Material Design Lite in grey and orange. The tagline was “My thoughts and rambles”, and the front page held exactly one post, about interrupt-driven UART code in avr-libc.
- 2020 to 2026: hello-friend-ng. From 2020 the site ran the hello-friend-ng theme, a dark, terminal-flavoured theme with a
> martinellis.melogo. It survived every Hugo upgrade from 0.76 to 0.148: here it is in October 2020, January 2023 and in its last snapshot, February 2026. At some point a config change left the footer reading “© true Martin Ellis”, and nobody, me included, noticed for at least six months. - July 2025: briefly not a website. One snapshot of the bare domain caught the Nginx Proxy Manager default page instead of the site.
- 2026: this version. Rebuilt with its own theme: pixel fonts, 88×31 badges, everything in a little window, and a posts page with a tab for each year.
Build
- Generated with Hugo, one theme, no build pipeline beyond
hugo --minify. - One stylesheet, one small script for the theme toggle, search and footnotes.
- Works without JavaScript; footnotes fall back to a list at the end.
Type and Icons
| Use | Typeface |
|---|---|
| Headings | Departure Mono |
| Nav, buttons, window bars, tabs | Silkscreen |
| Body text | Atkinson Hyperlegible |
| Dates, tags, code | IBM Plex Mono |
| Counters, 88×31 badges | VT323 |
Icons are Pixelarticons (MIT). The bigger icons in photo galleries are from the Pixel Icon Library by HackerNoon, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The colours are sampled from the illustration of me on the About page.
Place names on the photo gallery maps come from GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0, looked up at build time so no locations are sent anywhere.
Licence
Writing, photos and illustrations are © Martin Ellis, all rights reserved. Please ask before reusing them. Code snippets in posts are yours to copy.