billo.systems

Source for billo.systems — the Billo Systems calling-card site.

Built with Cobalt (Rust static-site generator, Liquid templates).

Layout

_cobalt.yml      Site config
_layouts/        Liquid page templates
_sass/           SCSS partials (tokens, primitives, base, landing)
main.scss        Entry stylesheet (compiles to /main.css)
index.liquid     Landing page
assets/          Static assets — self-hosted: fonts/, katex/, js/ (Prism), images/authors/
scripts/         Setup, asset-vendoring, preview, deploy

The blog (/articles/) and its templates are documented in docs/templates.md.

First-time setup

cargo install cobalt-bin              # one-time
chmod +x scripts/*.sh                 # one-time
./scripts/setup-site-worktree.sh      # creates orphan `site` branch + ./site/ worktree
git push -u origin site               # publish the site branch
./scripts/fetch-fonts.sh              # Fontsource .woff2 → assets/fonts/
./scripts/fetch-katex.sh              # KaTeX JS/CSS/woff2 → assets/katex/  (math posts)
./scripts/fetch-avatars.sh            # author GitHub avatars → assets/images/authors/
./scripts/install-pagefind.sh         # Pagefind binary on PATH (search indexer)

Then in the GitHub repo: Settings → Pages → source branch site.

Self-hosted assets (no CDN)

Everything the pages load at render time is served from this site — no third-party CDN. Each asset family has a vendoring script (re-run to refresh / bump a pinned version, then commit the result):

Script	Vendors	Into	Notes
fetch-fonts.sh	Fraunces, Source Serif, IBM Plex Mono, Brygada 1918, Literata, Lora, Recursive (Fontsource woff2)	assets/fonts/	@font-face in _sass/_fonts.scss + _sass/_blog-fonts.scss
fetch-katex.sh	KaTeX (katex.min.{js,css}, auto-render.min.js, fonts)	assets/katex/	Loaded only on posts with data.math: true (guarded in blog-post.liquid). Detail + the pulldown-cmark backslash gotcha: docs/templates.md § Math (KaTeX)
fetch-avatars.sh	each github_user's avatar from _data/authors.yml	assets/images/authors/	Writes the local path back into authors.yml; author card prefers it
install-pagefind.sh	the Pagefind search binary	PATH	Used by preview.sh / deploy.sh to build the search index

Prism (client-side syntax highlighting) is likewise vendored at assets/js/prism.js.

Local development

./scripts/preview.sh                  # build + Pagefind index + serve at http://localhost:1414

Use preview.sh, not cobalt serve, for a full local preview: cobalt serve rebuilds into a temp dir and wipes site/pagefind/, so search returns nothing under it. preview.sh runs cobalt build then pagefind --site site --serve. For a quick no-search build, plain cobalt build still works.

Deploy

./scripts/deploy.sh                   # build, commit to site branch, push

Branches

• main — source of truth (development branch).
• site — orphan branch holding built output; what GitHub Pages serves.
• legacy-2014-template — pre-2026 Bootstrap template, archived.