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title: Annotating-Literature Post-Mortem
tags: webdev, uni
date: 2026-03-04
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Because I’m a deeply insane person who loves making more work for myself, I volunteered to update the annotating-literature website¹1. Ilea, my annotations are incoming this time. To be frank, I almost added them to the website during testing it.

Tech Stack

I’ve recently built a lot of websites for a lot of different people because that’s something I enjoy doing. Usually, I prefer 11ty because I think it’s sane to just ship static files wherever possible. For this website, however, this was not going to work, as the editors are less technical than I am.

At first I wanted to use Kirby, but this proved more trouble than it was worth: the regular pages we have are very simple, but the annotations are custom and need to be saved as TEI XML. I solved this by building a custom sveltekit app. I had never worked with it before and usually try to avoid javascript/typescript like the plague, but it wound up being fairly pleasant—even if I wound up relying more than I would have liked on Claude to help me with building errors and warnings.

For styling, I dugout my old tailwind-css skills and then went insane²2. There have been a lot of changes and things like my Mac being in dark-mode, but displaying the website in light-mode caused me a lot of headaches, but I really enjoyed writing some CSS again—it’s been a while!

The Process

The process was wonderful—I met our dean to talk about the new website and she told me to burn the old one to the ground and rebuild it from scratch however I pleased³3. What wouldn’t I give for all my tasks to be like that! One of many reasons I could never work as a freelancer.

The Feature Creep

My spec sheet was very vague⁴4. My fault—I didn’t ask because I feared any answer, so the new website wound up with more features than the old one:

• automatically generated author pages (I think those are nice—now they only need someone to add some content and a photo)
• the CMS-part (I was only tasked with re-implementing the viewer, but I thought it’d just be easier for everyone involved, if I moved all the parts of the website into the svelte app and gave all of it consistent styling and a single place to edit)
• the TEI XML renderer (this one is on me because I brought it up and suggested implementing it in a way that made it easy for editors, but it drove me to madness—people from the humanities should not be allowed to write tech specs)

The Design

I quite like the design I came up with; we’ll see if I need to do some redesigning. I went with Gentium Plus and an off-white background to recall old books because the annotated texts are fairly old.

I’m still not a huge fan of the icons I used. The design of them is nice in general, but I would have liked something more hand-drawn / rough around the edges to fit the vibe of the design better.

I used a nice, bright shade of purple as the accent colour because it’s a colour I like and no one complained⁵5. Another win!.

Overall, I think the design is fairly generic and unobtrusive, but has a lot of nice touches, so it’ll hopefully be acceptable for a few years. Most of it is bundled in a few separate files, so it should be fairly easy to change if the powers that be decide on it.

Summary

I really like building websites!