kennethreitz.org

Kenneth Reitz's personal website and digital garden. A living exploration of how technology can serve human consciousness rather than exploit it.

Built with Responder, powered by markdown content, deployed on Fly.io.

Quick Start

# Install dependencies
uv sync

# Run development server
uv run python engine.py

The site will be available at http://localhost:8000.

Docker

docker compose up

Architecture

This is a single-file Responder application (engine.py) serving markdown content from data/.

kennethreitz.org/
├── engine.py              # The whole application
├── data/                  # All content (markdown)
│   ├── essays/            # 250+ essays (2008-2026)
│   ├── software/          # Project pages
│   ├── themes/            # Thematic collections
│   ├── artificial-intelligence/
│   ├── poetry/
│   ├── knowledge/         # Published from the Obsidian vault (generated)
│   ├── photography/
│   ├── music/
│   └── *.md               # Standalone pages
├── tuftecms/
│   ├── templates/         # Jinja2 templates
│   ├── static/            # CSS, fonts, images
│   ├── core/              # Cache, markdown rendering
│   └── utils/             # Content helpers, SVG icons
├── Dockerfile
├── fly.toml               # Fly.io deployment config
└── pyproject.toml

URL paths mirror the filesystem: data/essays/2025-08-26-example.md → /essays/2025-08-26-example

Features

• Tufte-style sidenotes — margin commentary without disrupting flow.
• Full-site search — cached index built at startup, server-side autocomplete.
• Content indexes — automatic extraction of sidenotes, quotes, outlines, connections, terms, themes.
• Legacy URL redirects — intelligent matching for old URL patterns (301 permanent).
• Bot detection — logs scraper activity with User-Agent identification.
• Structured logging — request-scoped context (ID, method, path, client IP) on every log line.
• PDF generation — server-side via WeasyPrint.
• Generated SVG icons — unique algorithmic icons for every piece of content.
• RSS feed — at /feed.xml.
• Knowledge graph — interactive D3 visualization of content connections.
• Dark mode — system-preference and manual toggle.

API Endpoints

GET /api/search?q=query           # Full-site search with scoring
GET /api/search/autocomplete?q=q  # Title-based autocomplete (8 results)
GET /api/blog                     # Essay listing
GET /api/themes                   # Theme listing with icons
GET /api/directory-tree            # Site directory structure
GET /api/icon/<path>              # Generated SVG icon
GET /api/cache-stats              # Cache performance metrics

Deployment

Deployed on Fly.io with 2 shared CPUs, 2GB RAM, 2 uvicorn workers.

fly deploy

Content

The data/ directory contains 15+ years of writing — essays, software documentation, poetry, photography, AI explorations, and personal pages. Content is plain markdown with optional YAML frontmatter and Tufte-style HTML sidenotes.

License

MIT

Knowledge

/knowledge publishes the Knowledge/ folder of Kenneth's Obsidian vault: mythology, tarot, psychology, music theory, and the rest of the reference shelf. It's generated, so edit the vault and re-sync rather than editing data/knowledge/ by hand:

$ uv run python scripts/import_knowledge.py --vault ~/Notes

The importer converts wikilinks, callouts, and Dataview tables to plain Markdown, and withholds personal notes (see EXCLUDED in the script and the privacy guard it applies to every note). At render time, tuftecms/core/knowledge.py turns the published note titles into a concept index: the first mentions of a concept on ordinary pages link to its Knowledge note (capped per page, never inside headings, code, links, or sidenotes), and every Knowledge note lists the pages that mention it.