About This Website

Launched in 2025, ryppl.net is the personal website of Risp. It hosts a growing collection of essays on Science, Technology, Philosophy, everyday observations, and other areas of interest. The site emerged from a simple problem: thoughts accumulated in a Zettelkasten faster than they could be reflected upon. ryppl.net gives those ideas space to exist—essays, poetry, and anything else that deserves to be written and shared.

FEATURES: On your left, you may toggle between light- and dark-mode ( / ) or use the search bar ( ) to search the site. Below them is a drop-down menu to help you navigate around the site. On your right, you will find a Graph View showing connections between pages based on their tags. Below that is a Table of Contents, Backlinks and floating buttons to scroll to the top or bottom of the page.

Content

Target Audience

WIP

Navigation

Navigation on this site remains simply linear for now. On the left sidebar is a drop-down menu which lists pages published sequentially. At the time of writing, this consists of a modest 2-3 pages. On the right is a graph view equivalent to Obsidian’s graph view; pages are tagged and any common tags link two pages together. This allows one to find related pages there. Until this site is more populated, I expect the Graph View will look rather boring.

Over time, I plan to add a Header section at the top for quicker navigation across pages. With more pages, I plan to switch to a tree structure (a hierarchical arrangement of a set of nodes, where each node contains either more nodes or ‘leaves’) that I use for my own notes too. Tentatively, this page serves as the top most node of the tree, but that too will change.

Confidence Tags

Confidence tags serve as a metric for my level of confidence in a topic. Obviously, there will be topics that I am more comfortable with, and others which are more exploratory in nature. Of the topics which are autobiographical, a rating system might serve as a measure of my belief in certain values, observations or principles.

Currently, the rating system is a work in progress. I anticipate it will be completed by Jan 2026.

Writing

When treated as a serious endeavour, writing can be just as technical as any other pursuit. There are many nuances in what is said and how something can be said. Moreover, as I pay more attention to my writing, I realize I am guilty of several mistakes in diction, punctuation, spelling, inconsistency in adopting British or American English, and so on.

My solution is to automate as much of this endeavour as possible. By having checkers run in the background, poor word choice and typography errors are corrected immediately. After I have completed a draft, I also pass it through another series of checkers as an added measure.

The list of language checks made during and after my writing include,

• spellchecker
• check quotation conventions and editorial signals
• check for logical quotation
• check for the word “significant/significantly/significance” and substitute for substantially or insert “statistically” where appropriate ¹
• custom hotstrings and autocorrect for brevity, diction, shorthand, spelling, and style via AutoHotkey
• proselint

Other miscellaneous writing principles, in no order:

• write shorter paragraphs
• affirmative sentences are clearer than negative sentences
• words that are related should be close together
• better to sound monotonous than confusing

Infrastructure

In brief, ryppl.net is implemented as a static site generated using Quartz4. Source files are written in Markdown while Quartz files are composed of Typescript files, SCSS files and client-side scripts. Node handles all the steps needed to convert Typescript to Javascript, combines the SCSS files into a single CSS, and places any scripts into the HTML files directly. Using a combination of filters and plugins, the content is rendered into static HTML to build the site.

For more information, check out the Quartz website page on the Architecture directly.

Hosting

ryppl.net is freely hosted on the Cloudflare CDN. Alternatively, one may also use Github Pages to host their Quartz site, as outlined on the Quartz website page on Hosting.

Popularity

About two months since starting ryppl.net, I have finally found the time to look at the site’s web traffic. According to Cloudflare’s analytics, ryppl.net has received traffic from across the globe, totalling to just over 60 unique visitors with a total of nearly 400 requests through Cloudflare.

Though these numbers are tiny, they offer some motivation to keep writing as I know that my work has a measurable contribution to the greater Internet. If you are interested, the countries with the most traffic are listed in the dropdown below.

Show

Rank	Country
1	Canada
2	USA
3	South Korea
4	Singapore
5	France

Source

The revision history is logged in git; whenever new changes are synced to a private repository, Cloudflare will deploy a new version of the site within seconds.

Design

Motivations

Like most personal websites, ryppl.net prefers fast performance and easy accessibility to pages across the site. My core principles when building this site are listed below, in no specific order:

1. Minimalism
2. Speed and Performance
3. Predictability

The current feature set builds upon Quartz 4’s existing capabilities, with plans to extend the site’s CSS functionality and visual elements in the future.

Design Principles

1. Minimalism
   The black-and-white aesthetic screams minimalist, if you haven’t already noticed. I believe that minimalism helps one focus on the content in front of them—the most important thing this website has to offer—rather than getting distracted by fancy animations or images. Purists may argue that the site can be further simplified—and they are right! The Graph View can be condensed to an “Related” section, and the animations dropped. However, I find the current implementation to strike an acceptable balance between minimalism, speed and accessibility, and with sufficient features that let me explore various themes and styles of emphasis throughout my work.

2. Speed and Performance
   Quartz4 uses Single-page-app style rendering, also known as SPA routing. As a user, you can expect fast and smooth loading between pages. I learned about SPA routing through an analogy, so perhaps it may prove helpful to you too:

   Traditional static sites load an entirely new HTML page from the server every time you click on it, resulting in a slight delay when navigating pages. This is like flipping through pages in a physical magazine, where the time delay is represented by duration to flip a page.
   SPA routing reduces delay because it re-renders content inside a single, persistent page. This is like swiping through pages on a digital magazine from your kindle, where the text changes when you swipe but the unit containing and displaying your information remains unchanged.

3. Predictability
   Most people are already familiar with the gestures, tools and symbols that represent various actions that they can perform on a website, and carry those expectations to other sites they visit. ² There is no reason to break convention; again, I do not want to distract readers from the content that is in front of them. In other words, we abide by Jakob’s Law.

Other miscellaneous design principles, in no order:

• visual design is not decoration
• “they might never tell you it’s broken”
• strive for UI consistency
• if you’re doing something three times, fix it
• do not center text unecessarily
• repeat style choices
• elements in close proximity will be perceived as related
• the eyes follow a ‘Z’-shaped path

Style

This website contains a multitude of design changes. Some of them are motivated by practical choices, but most are motivated by stylistic choices. I will explain these choices below.

Size and Spacing

• Headers scale in size exponentially
  Using a $1.25^n$ scale ratio, where $n=0$ for body text, $n$ increases in integer increments for headers and the page title. You may find a typescale like this one helpful.

• Body paragraphs and the Explorer are slightly left-indented
  This is a remnant from when I used to indent left slightly while writing essays by hand. I liked the look of it and migrated that style onto the website.

• Customized relative margins and paddings Working in relative units, I adjusted the margins and paddings for individual components to my satisfaction. I avoided using px where possible to avoid chaotic arrangements that can only get worse with different resolutions, devices and font (styles/decorations).

Typography and Color

Three main fonts (available on Google Fonts) are used across the website.

• Headers use a serif font while body text use sans serif. Dropcaps make use of Times New Roman exclusively.

• Font weights were arbitrarily chosen; smaller weight and size for code, higher weight for body text and headers

Colors were specifically chosen to fit the minimalistic, gray scale theme.

• For important highlighting, two shades of Gold were chosen for light and dark modes.

Show

quartz.config.ts

typography: {
         header: {
         name: "Noto Serif",
         weights: [700, 800],
         includeItalic: true,
       },
       body: {
         name: "Noto Sans",
         weights: [500, 600, 700, 800],
         includeItalic: true,
       },
       code: {
         name: "IBM Plex Mono",
         weights: [400, 700],
         includeItalic: true,
       },
     },
colors: {
       lightMode: {
         light: "#ebebec",
         lightgray: "#bbbbbb",
         gray: "#606060",
         darkgray: "#444444",
         dark: "#161618",
         secondary: "#b8b8b8ff",
         tertiary: "#4e4e4e",
         highlight: "rgba(143, 159, 169, 0.15)",
         textHighlight: "#FFD700ff",
       },
       darkMode: {
         light: "#161618",
         lightgray: "#444444",
         gray: "#606060",
         darkgray: "#bbbbbb",
         dark: "#ebebec",
         secondary: "#d4d4d4bb",
         tertiary: "#4e4e4e",
         highlight: "rgba(143, 159, 169, 0.15)",
         textHighlight: "#FFD700a0",
       },
     },

License

In general, I believe it is more important that people know where creative works come from than it is that authors and artists receive full credit. Creative works are meant to be admired, to inspire and to foster thoughtful reflection. I do not want copyright laws to be a barrier to these goals, and thus all content on this website may be considered entirely in the public domain. In other words, this site is licensed under the Creative Commons public domain license and I relinquish copyright protection to all works of authorship here.

If you do distribute or modify content from ryppl.net, I would greatly appreciate it if you referred back to the site as that stimulates more traffic, gives back to open-source / freely available content, and motivates me to continue writing.

Disclaimer

Although some people in my life will be referenced from time to time, the opinions expressed here are my entirely my own; they do not reflect the views or values of my friends, family, colleagues, or employers, with whom this site has no affiliations whatsoever.

Contact Me

Email: rypplcontact [at] gmail [dot] com
Send Me Anonymous Feedback: Click here

Footnotes

1. Substantially is less ambiguous outside of statistical contexts; make clear whether you mean significance in effect size or in “statistical significance” used for inferential statistics. ↩

2. Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know. ↩