Building the Color Accents on This Site

The colored words on this site went through three versions before they actually did their job. I started with a fully automatic keyword matcher, then made it per-page, and ended up deleting most of it for something way simpler. This is the builder’s side of that, including the parts that didn’t work. The Goal I play a lot of ASCII and text-based games, and one of my favorite details in Caves of Qud is how it colors certain words: an item name in a gradient, a faction in its own color. It makes a wall of text easy to scan. I wanted the same thing here, with a few constraints: ...

No. 2 · October 30, 2026 · 6 min · Erik Failing

How I Built This Site

This site is a static Hugo site using the PaperMod theme, built and deployed by GitHub Actions to GitHub Pages, with my Squarespace domain pointed at it. Below is how the pieces fit together, the design decisions I made along the way, and how I used an LLM to help (and where I had to catch its mistakes). The Setup In One Picture The whole thing is pretty simple once you see the flow: ...

No. 1 · October 30, 2026 · 7 min · Erik Failing