Marginalia

Overview

Marginalia is a plain personal essay blog — the kind of theme this catalog has been missing among its business-vertical sites. No shop, no product catalogue, no custom content type standing in for anything. Just posts, categories, tags, and the connections between them.

Two things replace decoration with the blog’s own real data:

1. A real citation graph (“Commonplace”). The theme parses every published post’s actual link markup for references to other posts on the same site and draws the result as a radial diagram — chords are real citations pulled from post content, not a recommendation engine’s guess, and dot size is real inbound-link count.

2. A real posting-cadence calendar. A GitHub-contribution-style grid built from actual post publish dates, gaps included — it shows how a site was actually written, not a manufactured continuous stream.

The persistent background is a real, deliberately lightweight Three.js scene: a stack of paper on a desk lit by one directional light that drifts slowly, with a handful of dust motes — never post-processing, never more than a few dozen triangles. It degrades to a plain CSS gradient under reduced-motion, no-WebGL2, or save-data. Self-hosted Newsreader + Inter.