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Site Information

I take pride on keeping my website as minimal as possible, even if that means the number of commits is excessive, or I spend hours comparing different fonts in an effort to find one that is bold, but not loud. However, as a side effect of this, I frequently realize I don’t have any place to thank the people who’s code or other work has contributed to helping me to host, and design, this website. That is what this page is for. Feel free to give the awesome people below a look to find out more about them.

In the event that I once used something, but I no longer do, I will still include a link to the work that person did.

Code

  • Without Jekyll, I wouldn’t have a website. Jekyll is a program based in ruby that takes files written in Markdown and converts them into a static site. I don’t speak any of the web languages, but I do understand Markdown, so this nifty program means I can have a web presence.
    Jekyll is available under the MIT License.
  • Poole bills itself as “a dilligent and nobel steward for building Jekyll sites.” I can certainly testify to that. The designer of Poole is also behind the theme I am currently using with this site, which is called Lanyon and is delightfully minimalist. Poole is currently using SASS to write its designs, which I know absolutely nothing about, but I look forward to trying my hand at porting Lanyon over to it.
    Both Poole and Lanyon are available under the MIT License.

Fonts

Being a typist has to be frustrating. You create rather beautiful glyphs, and release them for free under various licenses, and suddenly it is used everywhere without so much as a hint to it being your work. This site uses three different fonts:

  • Raleway is the font choice for what you are reading right now. It is an elegant, sans-serif font that is minimalist at the 300 weight, but manages to bring in quite a lot of character at the 400 weight. It was developed by “The League of Movable Type” but that website lists Matt McInerney as the sole contributer. I use it at 400 weight.
    Raleway is released under the SIL Open Font License.
  • Dosis is the font that is used for headers, pagination buttons, as well as the navigation bar. It was designed by Edgar Tolentino, refined by Pablo Impallari, and spaced by Igino Marini. It has a rather refreshing level of character, and was the perfect addition to my site to really make it pop. I use it at 400 weight, which is classified as minimalist by the designers, but I think it has quite a strong impression.
    Dosis is released under the SIL Open Font License.
  • Inconsolata is probably one of my favourite monospaced fonts. For deployment on this website it was between Inconsolata or Anonymous Pro and after trying them both out, I preferred the former. It was designed by Raph Levien and he says that it is his first serious font design. You can view his entire collection by visiting Inconsolata’s official website. I actually use this on my own computer in terminals and IDEs. On this site it is used at 400 weight.
    Inconsolata is released under the SIL Open Font License.

Utilities

I use a number of tools to host and maintain this website, one of which I am rather ashamed to say I have come to like quite a lot, despite the fact that it is as far away from minimal as anything could ever be.

  • To get us started, this website is proudly hosted on Github, which is also, in my personal opinion, one of the best choices for software hosting, period. As you can probably guess, this also means that I use git as my version control system of choice.
  • While I was previously using vim to do my editing, I have since switched over to Atom. While it is large and somewhat unwieldy, the package management system gives me access to a more than a few utilities that I can use to simplify my workflow.
  • Finally, my convoluted workflow makes use of Travis-CI to check over my development branch before I push it live. At first it was just an exercise in having something I didn’t really need, but using it has actually found quite a few things that I never would have caught on my own.