jk0.org

Living on a pale blue dot

Product

Platform

web

Users

• Friends and the amateur radio community: people who know Josh as jk0 and drop by to see what he’s up to or reread old posts.
• Peers and employers: engineers and recruiters checking who Josh is. They usually land on the homepage or About page and leave quickly.
• Search visitors: people who arrive on one old post (often a technical how-to) from a search engine and may never see another page.
• Josh himself: the site is a personal record, so outside readers are welcome but not the point.

Product Purpose

jk0.org is Josh Kearney’s personal archive and online calling card. It keeps 310 posts written from 2001 to 2012 readable and findable, and gives a short honest answer to “who is jk0?” New posts will be rare or never. Success means old posts stay easy to read and link to, and a first-time visitor gets a quick, accurate sense of who Josh is.

Positioning

It’s one person’s real archive covering more than a decade, written by an engineer, amateur radio operator, volunteer firefighter and self-described professional drinker. Its personality comes from that voice and history, not from a brand.

Operating Context

• Readers arrive cold on single posts from search, via old links from forums and other sites, or by typing the domain.
• The site is read on desktop and mobile. Most visits are short.
• Publishing is pushing to master; GitHub Pages builds it.

Capabilities and Constraints

• Jekyll on GitHub Pages, with no build step, no CI and no Gemfile. Only plugins on the GitHub Pages whitelist (jekyll-paginate, jekyll-feed, jekyll-sitemap).
• Existing post permalinks (permalink: pretty) must stay stable so old links and search results keep working.
• Homepage pagination at 10 posts per page, plus an RSS feed (/feed.xml) and a sitemap.
• Custom domain jk0.org via CNAME, with HTTPS enforced.
• Post content is legacy HTML from many eras: inline images (images/uploads/), YouTube embeds, code blocks, tables. Design must handle old markup it can’t rewrite post by post.
• No tags, categories, or search today. Whether to add archive navigation is still open.

Brand Commitments

• The tagline “living on a pale blue dot”.
• The jk0 handle and the irreverent bio voice (“Engineer, Amateur Radio Operator, Volunteer Firefighter and Professional Drinker”).
• Contact via mailto:josh@jk0.org.

Evidence on Hand

• 310 posts in _posts/ (2001–2012).
• Profile photo images/josh.jpg; About page about.html.
• No testimonials, project lists, or other claims beyond what’s in the posts and the About page. Don’t invent any.

Product Principles

1. The archive comes first. Every post, however old or oddly formatted, should read well.
2. Don’t break the web. URLs, the feed, and old inbound links are permanent.
3. The voice is the personality. Let Josh’s writing and the bio’s tone set the character instead of decoration.
4. Stay low-maintenance. Static and dependency-free, so it keeps working untouched for years.