I’m Michael Rose and I’ve made mistakes.
I do not enjoy writing about myself.

Curated writing
Long form writing mostly about web development and design.

Optimizing and automating my Jekyll site build
Lessons learned from building, optimizing, and deploying a huge static site with everyone's favorite SSG — Jekyll.
read more →

Accessing static files in Jekyll
Learn how to use static files with Jekyll to create a gallery of images automatically without a plugin.
read more →

Improving Staticman comments on a Jekyll site
How to use Staticman to add threaded comments and reply notifications to a static-based Jekyll site.
read more →

Mastering Pencil by FiftyThree
Learn how to create impressive effects with 53's Pencil stylus and Paper app, using exclusive features like Blend and Surface Pressure.
read more →
Recently published
Thoughts, inspiration, mistakes, and other minutia.
Adding last modified timestamps with Git
A common ask of Jekyll, Gatsby, and other static site generator users is, “how do I automatically set the date in YAML front matter?” Today…
read more →
URLs and links in Jekyll
Before you can link pages and assets together with Jekyll, you need to know how it assigns URLs (or permalinks) to each. If you are a…
read more →
Jekyll’s site.url and baseurl
Jekyll’s site and variables cause a lot of confusion for users. I see it all the time in the Jekyll Talk forum, Stackoverflow, or as bug…
read more →
Not so quick with the Gatsby site optimizations
This is the post where I talk about neglecting the site and pledge to blog more… wait, wasn’t I suppose to do this on January 1st? Jokes…
read more →