How this site is put together

Eleventy generates SSR AMP from Markdown via eleventy-plugin-amp.

The design is WordPress’s Twenty Nineteen (with some alterations, including the font, which is Inria Sans), as passed through the AMP WP plugin. (The CSS is not AMP-compatible by default.)

I’ve owned the beebo.org domain since 17 June 1999, and Gandi has been my registrar the whole time. It’s currently hosted on Firebase.

I also use and love VS Code, Node, fish, and GitHub.

Who is Beebo?

Beebo is a character in a series of children’s books. I have three: The House that Beebo Built (ISBN: 0224010913, Beebo and the Fizzimen (ISBN: 0224010921) and Beebo and the Funny Machine (ISBN: 022401093X). Each book starts with Beebo, his buddy Mop, and Mop’s hamster Hector arriving in an unfamiliar town. They work hard and well, whilst keeping mostly to themselves. In his spare time Beebo builds wonderful things out of junk—an enormous pipe organ, a mechanical fire-breathing dragon, an automatic fence-builder.

By about the middle of each book, Beebo and Mop become happy, if not rich … at which point trouble strikes: in the first book their ramshackle mansion finds itself in the middle of a apartment construction zone; in the second, Beebo wakes up one day to find his face on billboards all over town, his stolen image being used to sell soft-drink; in the third Beebo and Mop are expelled from an angry and nameless authoritarian principality for having no visa, no identity card, and no passport.

In each book, Beebo and Mop are unjustly treated by the state. We should all thank the author, Philippe Fix, for taking on the thankless task of providing this lesson to the children of the world: it’s an important inviolable truth for them to learn, and not one doled out by the children’s media. (The third book is particularly bleak—it ends with Beebo and Mop growing smaller and smaller as they descend into earth.) One wonders what happened to Mr. Fix himself. A long and happy life, one hopes.