Pages, and what the nav is for

A woman emailed in June asking whether I take commissions, and I realized I had written forty thousand words about dovetails without ever writing down who I am or where the shop is. Everything on this site was a journal entry, which meant everything was dated, everything was in the feed, and everything scrolled away.

Some writing is not an entry. “About” is not an entry. A colophon is not an entry. They do not belong to a day, they should not turn up in the RSS feed, and they should not sit in a tag page between two posts about finishing schedules. They are just there, permanently, waiting for someone who wants them.

That is what standalone pages are for. They live in content/pages/ rather than content/posts/, one file per page, and their frontmatter is almost nothing:

---
title: About
---

No date, no tags, no slug line, no draft flag. The slug comes from the filename, so about.md becomes about.html. A page is a title and a body, and it is the missing date that keeps it out of the post list, out of the feed, and out of the tag pages.

Which raises the obvious question of how anyone finds them, since nothing links to a page automatically. That is the nav’s job. The nav is a list of labels and urls in overprint.yml, and it is the one place where the site’s structure is stated rather than inferred:

nav:
  - { label: Journal, url: index.html }
  - { label: About, url: about.html }
  - { label: Colophon, url: colophon.html }

index.html is the journal itself, and the other two are the pages I just wrote, in the order I want them read. A nav entry can also point at a tag page if you want a section that is really a filter, though I would be careful there, because a nav link to a tag with nothing in it is a promise the site cannot keep.

I wrote both pages in an afternoon. The About is short and says where the shop is. The Colophon took longer, because explaining why the page is cream meant admitting I had a reason.

I still have not written back to the woman who emailed.