Hello, world

This is the first post on the Observatory. If you’re reading it, the blog scaffolding works.

What this blog is

A low-pressure place to write things down — data work, Swift experiments, astrophysics footnotes, whatever. No posting schedule. Short is fine. Rough is fine.

How it’s built

It’s plain Jekyll. Posts are markdown files in _posts/ named YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md with a bit of YAML frontmatter at the top (title, date, tags, summary). GitHub rebuilds the site every time I commit a new one. No database, no CMS, no admin panel — just files.

To add a new post

1. On GitHub, go to the _posts/ folder and click Add file → Create new file.
2. Name it something like 2026-05-01-some-idea.md.
3. Paste a frontmatter block at the top, then write in markdown below it.
4. Commit. The site rebuilds and /blog/ updates.

That’s it.