en.tomitaku.net

How to read

How to read this site

tomitaku.net is a personal encyclopedia of words its owner has found worth looking up, together with a weblog he kept from 2009 to 2018. This page explains how to read it. Every component used in the entries appears here once. The English entries are translated by Claude and only lightly checked; the Japanese is the original. The weblog exists in Japanese only.

The first screen

When you open the site, a sentence is typed out: one paragraph that passes through a few entries of this encyclopedia. Claude wrote it; the owner reads it and cuts. As entries are added, more are written. When the typing ends you are asked "Read another [Y/n]", and Y or Enter brings the next one. After n, a ">" appears. Type something there and the index is searched for that word※1.

Index

"Index" at the top right lists the entries, sorted by date updated or A–Z. Typing in the box narrows them by title, aliases and body text. Entries that exist only in Japanese are not listed here; the Japanese index at tomitaku.net has them all.

Entries

  • Entries are written in Obsidian. The files in the vault's 01-MyPedia go through GitHub and become this site as they are. No CMS is involved
  • Most entries were researched and written together with Claude. The sources consulted are listed at the end of each entry, and points that could not be confirmed are left under "To verify"
  • The URL is en.tomitaku.net/entry-name/. Aliases open the same page. "ja" at the top right opens the Japanese entry, which is the original
  • Below each entry, "Mentioned in" lists the entries that mention it, and "Similar" lists the entries whose text is close to it. Both are counted by machine

Weblog

The 566 posts written between 2009 and 2018 are kept as they were, in Japanese, at tomitaku.net/blog/. Beneath each image in a post, its source is noted; where the source could not be traced, it says so. If you hold the rights to an image and would like it removed, it will be taken down at once. Please send a DM to @tomitaku on X.

Links

  • A blue underline marks a word that has an entry. Once you have read the entry, it turns purple
  • A link with ↗ opens an external site
  • A ※ in the text is a note. Notes sit beside the text※2

Layout

The type is the browser's default sans-serif and monospace, nothing else, and no bold is used. Headings and body text differ only in size. Every dimension derives from one base size, S, and every vertical position falls on a multiple of one tenth of S※3. Images are never shown larger than their actual size; their width fits the column and their height is rounded to the grid.

:root {
  --S: clamp(48px, 5vw, 72px);                   /* base size */
  --b: round(nearest, calc(var(--S) / 10), 1px); /* smallest vertical unit */
  --h: calc(var(--b) * 2);                       /* small text */
  --u: calc(var(--h) * 2);                       /* its line height */
}

2009

The second post on the old weblog begins like this, in Japanese.

The rental server I'm using installs WordPress for you. It looked handy, so without a second thought I let it install itself.

Seventeen years after that post of 11 March 2009, WordPress is gone, and this is what took its place.

Film

One of the earliest entries in this encyclopedia: the 1963 demonstration film of Sketchpad, digitized from 16mm.

YouTube

To verify

  • The English entries have not been checked against their sources; only the Japanese entries have

References