About

The original

Swerve of Shore is a close reading of James Joyce by Brandon Nicklaus. The spine is Ulysses, worked through in order from the 1922 first printing by Shakespeare & Co., with each entry taking a stretch of text and staying with it. Running alongside: Finnegans Wake from the 1999 Penguin Classics edition, notes on A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and essays placing Joyce against other writers.

The numbering is the clever part. Entries carry numbers rather than relying on dates, so a note written in November can sit exactly where it belongs in the reading — which is the only way a serialized project like this stays navigable past about thirty posts.

This rebuild

What you are reading is that site rebuilt on the zer0-mistakes Jekyll theme, with the owner’s permission, as a worked example of the theme handling a long-running serialized project.

The identity, navigation, taxonomy, entry titles and dates, and the images are all the real ones. Each entry opens with the first few paragraphs of the original, quoted and attributed, then links out — the full essays are not reproduced here. If you came for the criticism rather than the CSS, go there.

Why it makes a good example

Most theme demos are a handful of lorem-ipsum posts, which prove nothing. A real serialized project stresses the parts that actually break: a taxonomy deep enough to need its own sidebar, sections that exist before anything is filed under them, entries that sort by something other than date, and a hundred internal links that all have to resolve.

The reading order page explains the numbering; the project README has the technical breakdown.