About this Website
Design
My site is not structurally or conceptually complex, so I wanted its design to be minimalist. I wanted all of the focus to be on the text (it's the only real important content on my site, after all), so imitating in the design a printed page seemed natural. With this in mind, my choice of color (black text on a white page) seemed obvious, and most of my time was spent working on the type design. My biggest inspirations in choosing the type for the site were A List Apart and Tumbolia.
The heading typeface is the first of the following that the viewer has:
The body type is set in the first of the following that the user has installed:
- Verdana
- Myriad Pro
- Arial
- (default system sans-serif)
As a side note, I originally wanted to use Calluna for the site, but opted not to due to the fact that not many people have it installed. Nonetheless, I remain a huge fan of Jos Buivegna's work.
Implementation
I wrote the template for this site by hand, writing out the XHTML and CSS in
vim and testing the layout in Safari (WebKit's developer tools were
invaluable in the process!). The biggest resources I used were
A List Apart and
this CSS layout guide.
Content Management
To update this site, I use a static content management system called site,
which I wrote specifically for this purpose. site is written in Ruby, and it
allows me to write the content of the pages in
markdown, and handles rendering
the HTML and inserting it into the template. I may post the code here if I
ever develop it further.
