Michael Maclean

New Toys

For someone who hardly ever actually writes anything, I do spend quite a long time messing about with the software that powers my site. I think over the years I’ve variously used WordPress, eZ Publish, Habari, and probably other things that I’ve forgotten to run a weblog but never actually use it. Welcome to the latest incarnation, which this time is powered by Jekyll. I decided that running a database and a server-side language all the time for a site that doesn’t get much traffic is pointless, and hence Jekyll suits my purposes by generating flat HTML files that require no further processing. It does also mean that I can store the site itself on Github, and write Markdown files in Vim to create posts, which appeals to my geek side.

This time I built the theme from scratch myself, too, after spending a little too long reading books with names like The Elements of Typographic Style and Thinking With Type, as well as innumerable articles on A List Apart and places like that. I like to think that I have the typography of the site working to a reasonable level, and I’ll probably continue to ham-fistedly play with the rest of it. Just writing this post resulted in me messing with the CSS of the navigation as I wasn’t quite happy with how it looked.

In the time since my last post, I have actually done useful things to a couple of the software projects I’ve been working on. I’ll aim to try and get some of those written up soon.