Entropic Bloom — Claude Context

What this is

A personal blog at entropicbloom.com. The tagline is “some ideas emerging from the static”. Topics: philosophy of mind, consciousness, AI ethics, and adjacent ideas. The writing voice is direct and engaged — not academic driness, not tech-bro casualness. Somewhere in between.

Stack

Jekyll static site generator
Pure CSS — no Tailwind, no preprocessors, just assets/css/style.css with CSS custom properties
Vanilla JS — inline scripts only, no build step, no bundler
jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-redirect-from, jekyll-feed, and jekyll-sitemap plugins

Key files

File	Purpose
`assets/css/style.css`	All styles and animations
`_layouts/default.html`	Root HTML shell — includes static overlay, lotus, SVG turbulence filter
`_layouts/post.html`	Single post template
`_includes/header.html`	Nav and site title
`index.html`	Home page — shows 4 most recent posts as cards, lotus enabled
`entries.html`	Full archive with signal/static mode filtering (JS)
`gallery.html`	Image gallery at `/gallery/` — tag filters, lightbox
`_data/gallery.yml`	Gallery images: order, tags, dimensions, alt text
`_data/gallery_tags.yml`	Gallery filter buttons and their labels
`_posts/`	Markdown posts
`_config.yml`	Jekyll config — permalink format is `/:year/:month/:day/:title/`
`llms.txt`, `robots.txt`	Agent/crawler entry points, generated from posts. Feed (`/feed.xml`) and `/sitemap.xml` come from `jekyll-feed` and `jekyll-sitemap`

Design system

Color palette (CSS variables):

--faded-coral:     #f2b8a4
--muted-rose:      #d79f9f
--dusty-lavender:  #c8b6d8
--aged-porcelain:  #f2f0e9  ← main background
--ash-white:       #e6e4df
--linen-white:     #f5f1ea
--rust-red:        #a6453e  ← primary accent (links, headings, tags)
--blood-red:       #9c464a
--pomegranate:     #a32c32

Typography:

Cormorant Garamond (serif) — titles, post content, decorative text
Montserrat (sans-serif, weight 300) — body, nav, meta

Aesthetic principles:

Warm, muted, slightly aged palette — not clinical, not loud
Subtle over obvious. Effects should feel textural, not decorative.
The site has a deliberate “signal from static” aesthetic — the name, the tagline, and the visual approach all tie into this. Analog/organic over digital/sharp.
Existing ambient effects: global fractal noise on body::before, static flicker overlay on lotus-container, animated lotus petals with SVG turbulence displacement, animated waves.

Post front matter

---
layout: post
title: "Post Title"
subtitle: "Optional — used as excerpt on cards and archive instead of auto-generated one"
date: YYYY-MM-DD
mode: signal  # required — signal (arguments, analysis) or static (moods, fragments)
status: ongoing  # optional — shows "Ongoing" instead of date
external_url: https://...  # optional — card links externally, opens in new tab, marked with an arrow (a play icon for YouTube/Vimeo)
---

Adding a gallery image

Two WebP files per image in assets/images/gallery/ — <name>.webp capped at 1600px for the lightbox, <name>-thumb.webp capped at 760px for the grid:

magick in.png -resize '1600x1600>' -strip -quality 82 assets/images/gallery/<name>.webp
magick in.png -resize '760x760>'   -strip -quality 78 assets/images/gallery/<name>-thumb.webp

Then add an entry to _data/gallery.yml with file (no extension), tags, the original w/h, and alt. Order in that file is display order; the page deals items across the columns row by row, so entries that sit together in the file sit together on the page. An image with no tags shows only under “all”.

Local previews

_layouts/default.html loads the stylesheet via absolute_url, so a plain jekyll build served statically pulls the live production CSS. Use ./serve.sh (or jekyll serve) to preview, or local CSS changes won’t show up.

Development branch convention

Feature branches follow the pattern claude/<description>-<id>.

Style preferences

Don’t add comments to CSS unless the logic is non-obvious
Don’t introduce JavaScript frameworks or build tooling
Keep effects subtle — this isn’t a portfolio site trying to impress with flashy animations
Prefer editing existing files over creating new ones
No emojis in content or UI