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MarginaliaPersonal Blog WordPress Theme

A real citation graph between your own posts, and a real calendar of when you actually wrote them — not a recommendation engine, not a manufactured streak. Restrained persistent desk-light background, no shop, no gimmicks.

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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.

Signature 1: persistent restrained Three.js desk-light scene — a low-poly paper stack + pen on a desk, one directional light arcing slowly across a full cycle, a handful of drifting dust motes, deliberately under a few dozen triangles with no post-processing to avoid any per-pixel shader cost. Signature 2: real citation graph ("Commonplace") — server-rendered SVG radial diagram computed at runtime from actual <a href> links between published posts, cached in a transient invalidated on save, node radius driven by real inbound-citation count. Signature 3: real posting-cadence calendar — GitHub-contribution-style grid built from actual post publish dates over the last year, gaps included. 17 demo essays across 4 categories (Essays/Notebook/Reading/Elsewhere) spanning three years with genuine cross-links. Self-hosted Newsreader + Inter (both OFL). No third-party JS libraries beyond Three.js, no build step.

What's included

  • Full theme source — every template, style sheet & script
  • One-click demo importer (idempotent, no page builder)
  • Live Customizer controls for copy, colours & content
  • Translation-ready .pot file + RTL stylesheet
  • HTML documentation + a CHANGELOG file
  • Lifetime updates + 6 months support (renewable)

Specifications

WordPress5.6 – 7.0
PHP8.0 – 8.3
BrowsersChrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge (latest)
LayoutFully responsive, mobile → desktop
LocalizationTranslation-ready · RTL included
AccessibilityKeyboard-navigable · prefers-reduced-motion
Page builderNot required — native Customizer
LicenseGNU GPL v2 · single-site commercial

Release

v1.0.0 A real citation graph between your own posts, and a real calendar of when you actually wrote them — not a recommendation engine, not a manufactured streak. Restrained persistent desk-light background, no shop, no gimmicks.

The complete, dated version history ships in the theme’s CHANGELOG file. Every purchase includes lifetime access to future updates.

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