now

The source for stuartwoodward.com/now.

What is this page

This is a "now page": a single page saying what I'm focused on at this point in my life. The idea comes from Derek Sivers, and the convention is explained at nownownow.com/about. It sits somewhere between a bio, which says who you are, and a blog, which says what you were thinking on a particular day. A now page says what has my attention at the moment, and it gets rewritten whenever that changes.

How it's built

A Jekyll static site with no plugins or JavaScript.

Each part of the page is a separate Markdown file in _sections/, exposed as a Jekyll collection with output: false. index.md sorts them by path and concatenates them, so filenames control the running order.

Files are named NN-slug.md, where NN is a two-digit order prefix and slug is a short, descriptive name for the section. 99- is reserved for a section that should always render last regardless of what else is added. Each file carries a title in its front matter and its body below. To add a section, drop in a new numbered file. To reorder, renumber.

Photos for the "Recently" section are picked up automatically from photos/. Drop an image file in and rebuild — that section loops over site.static_files, sorted newest-first by modification time, and renders one <figure> per photo with an alt attribute derived from the filename. There are no captions and nothing to hand-edit; SVGs in that folder are skipped, so it can also hold non-photo assets if needed.

The "Where I am" section reads from _includes/location.txt, kept separate from _sections/01-where.md so it's a single obvious file to update. If its contents contain /maps/embed — i.e. it's the URL from Google Maps' Share or embed this location > Embed a map tab, not a regular share link — a map is embedded. Anything else is shown as plain text. This distinction matters: Google blocks regular google.com/maps/... and maps.app.goo.gl/... share links from loading in an iframe on another site (X-Frame-Options), so only the dedicated embed URL actually renders a map; a regular link falls back to plain text.

Running it locally

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then open http://localhost:4000/now/ — note the /now/ suffix, which baseurl requires. Gemfile.lock is committed, so local and CI resolve to the same gem versions.

Enable the repo's git hooks once per clone:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

This runs .githooks/pre-commit, which strips EXIF/GPS metadata from any staged photo before the commit is created — needed since photos/ is served publicly and iPhone photos carry GPS coordinates by default. It requires exiftool or ImageMagick (magick/convert) on PATH; the commit is blocked with an install hint if neither is found. The strip removes the EXIF Orientation tag too, with no rotation applied to compensate — only stage photos that are already correctly oriented without depending on that tag, or they'll render sideways once committed.

How it's published

Pushing to main triggers a Cloudflare Workers build against this repo:

Setting	Value
Build command	bundle exec jekyll build -d _site/now
Deploy command	npx wrangler deploy
Root directory	/

The generated HTML is then served as static assets by a Worker. There's no server to run.

How /now is mapped onto the domain

The page lives at a path on an existing domain rather than on a subdomain, which takes two pieces that have to agree with each other.

A route claims the path. wrangler.jsonc declares:

"routes": [
  { "pattern": "stuartwoodward.com/now",   "zone_name": "stuartwoodward.com" },
  { "pattern": "stuartwoodward.com/now/*", "zone_name": "stuartwoodward.com" }
]

Requests for those paths are handed to this Worker; the rest of the domain carries on unaffected. This works because the stuartwoodward.com DNS records are proxied through Cloudflare — routes only fire on traffic through the edge. The two patterns are kept separate deliberately: a single /now* would also match /nowhere.

The output is nested to match. The Worker maps incoming URL paths onto the files it serves, so a request for /now/ looks for now/index.html in the assets directory. Two settings make that true:

• -d _site/now on the build command, so Jekyll writes into a now/ subdirectory of the assets root.
• baseurl: "/now" in _config.yml, so relative_url prefixes every link and image.

Miss either half and the build goes green while the page 404s. baseurl alone only rewrites links; it does not nest the output.

Note that adding routes to wrangler.jsonc disables the workers.dev subdomain by default. That's intentional here — the site is reachable at its real URL, and a second URL serving identical content invites duplicate-content indexing. Setting "workers_dev": true would bring it back, though only at /now/, never at the root.

Gotchas

• npx bundle doesn't work. bundle is a Ruby gem, not an npm package. If the build command is left unset, wrangler deploy auto-detects the project, guesses a build command of npx bundle exec jekyll build, and fails with could not determine executable to run. Committing wrangler.jsonc stops the auto-detection; setting the build command explicitly gives it the right one.
• wrangler.jsonc is in exclude in _config.yml, otherwise Jekyll copies it into the build output and it gets served publicly.