I’m a fan of the notion that one can unsee through notions like “expertise” and get things done no matter what the “base rates” and such similar notions technically say. One does not need to be or hire an expert in web design to make a good-looking website. One probably doesn’t even have to read a *textbook *on web design to make a good-looking website. In the year of our lord 2025, one can simply write out in excessive detail what one would like to see, and one’s talking, thinking machines will hold up a mirror one can then edit at will.

Even before the year of our lord 2025, one could admire well-designed websites such as gwern.net and steal from their looks whatever one wanted. It’s not a particularly difficult art, because nothing is inherently difficult! Have taste; materialize that taste; rinse and repeat until your very own dot net has risen from the ground.

This page documents the “rising from the ground” that went behind croissanthology dot com. It’s not the design page per se, which is here or rather will be here, at the time of this writing; that page will be for presenting the philosophy of the site, the exact CoT behind every decision, the bits and pieces laid in full detail so as to be easier to copy. This article, meanwhile, will be messy: a wonderful bazaar, as many website pages ought to be.

404 Page

Admire it here. I’m reading Dracula at the time I make this, in no small part because I’m attempting to allocate my downtime to consuming ~most fiction Gwern has written about, i.e. locally Suzanne Delage by Gene Wolf. The girl ChatGPT gave me from the prompt looked cute, so there she stands, guardian my 404 page for all eternity. The way I coded things up[ˆ1], the 404 page will randomly alternate between several 404 page designs, just like on Gwern.net. I like this idea: it makes the website much richer, adds some rabbit holes to fall in, and will make for a pleasant afternoon designing another dozen of these before we’re ready to go.

But for now, this will suffice; I have other things to do, like designing footnotes.

Footnotes

Why footnotes are so !E*#&@&!& hard to design and implement (for me), I do not know. It may have to do with the fact that every croissanthology.com page is a Google document, initially; and footnotes do not work intuitively-to-markdown on Google Docs. So I’ve given up on working with normal gdocs footnotes, and now I just write my footnotes directly in markdown and Jekyll parses that fine.

Now onto the actual design!

List of future additions

  • Little croissant icon for intralinks
  • Change the font! It’s hard to read rn. Baskerville or something atm.
  • Footnotes! Still! Don’t! Look! Good!
  • Image integration I mean come on
  • Table of contents not perfect yet
  • Thy headings should not copy automatically, do the Gwern spinning link thing
  • Bring back colored links! Gray is boring!