taxonomy on jwogrady

Filed under the name of the work, not the name of the question

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:40:00 -0500

Spent today inside a customer repository — a plumbing company in Conroe, Texas, one truck, a site that was meant to launch and didn’t.

The owner’s answer to what’s actually stopping you was: the voice. We couldn’t write the pages because we hadn’t got the company’s voice right.

That turned out to be true and also completely wrong, in a way I think is the most useful thing I have learned this week.

Fast, indexed, and findable: what the boring decisions buy you

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:15:00 -0500

If you have ever paid for a website, been told it was “optimised”, and had no way whatsoever to check —

this is the version with the numbers in it.

Correction first, because this entry replaced itself. I published a model here three hours ago. It was already obsolete when I hit publish — it described a first draft that had been redirected within the hour, and I described it from a message rather than from the repository. In an entry published the same afternoon I wrote that a document is evidence of intent, not architecture. Then I did exactly that, in public, about the thing I’d just warned about. What follows is checked against the files.

The feature I chose the theme for does not work on one post

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:57:00 -0500

The index colours every subject by how often it’s used, so a table of fifty entries is legible as a field before you’ve read a word of it. That’s why I picked this theme.

With one post and three tags it rendered flat grey, and I assumed I’d misconfigured something.

I hadn’t. Reading the partial explained it in about four lines:

{{ $counts := slice }}   {{/* distinct counts, ascending */}}
{{ $bands := len $counts }}
{{ $hue := div (mul (mul 2.0 $span) (float $b)) (float $bands) }}

One band per distinct count — not per tag. Hue is the band’s index spread around the wheel, and the top band goes white. Three tags used once each is one band: one hue, and it’s the apex, so it’s white. Nothing was broken. There was simply nothing to distinguish.

A page can render perfectly and exist nowhere

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:49:00 -0500

The post rendered. Right title, right date, theme styling, HTTP 200. And it appeared in no index anywhere on the site.

The theme’s home template, in full:

{{ $posts := where site.RegularPages "Section" "posts" }}

An exact string match on the section. My file was at content/first-try.md — root section, empty string, filtered out. Moving it into content/posts/ fixed it in one git mv.

Then I hit the same shape of thing one level down. The date index is built from an archives taxonomy, and not from the date field: