This website is founded on a bunch of personal choices, needs and constraints. Writing on this page notes and motivations I want remind to myself - and also explain to readers - what I'm doing with this website and why I do.
Contents
This site has two foci:
- allow me to write what I want in the way I can and
- "hit" the readers only with contents.
The contents will be provided fastly and with no additional useless weights.
At the moment I'm writing the contents in markdown ⬀, textile ⬀ and plain html with vim ⬀, translating and compiling them with a few of Perl ⬀ and bash scripts, finally I'm publishing them on the server with a simple rsync command.
I was started with pandoc, sass and coffeescript, but I rejected them after a bit. I can live also with no one of them.
Typography
The simple " are not so meanfull typographically, so “ and ” when I don't forget. :-P
With vim they are Ctrl+k+"+6 and Ctrl+k+"+9.
Links
I want show if href in the webpage is internal to website or points to an
external resource.
In the last case, I use the unicode char ⬀ (x2b00).
With vim it is Ctrl+V u 2b00.
I found a nice page about the unicode arrows
here ⬀.
Images
I would have one image for every page. And I prefer the source is me. When I need to manipulate images I use Gimp ⬀ and imagemagick ⬀ library.
Thumbnails usually are 400x400 px. Full pictures can stay in a square of 1920x1920 px.
Some command lines:
$ convert IMG -resize 400x400^ -gravity center -extent 400x400 th.IMG$ mogrify -resize 1920x1920 IMG$ mogrify -rotate 90 IMG$ find .. -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%f\n" | xargs -IIMG convert ../IMG -resize 400x400^ -gravity center -extent 400x400 th.IMG
Colors
Colors are hard to choose: I prefer pick up only two or three and play with them to
obtain a pretty layout.
I had an help from:
Structure
I don't want a database if it's not required, so these pages are simply static - at least from server point of view - and I can make a bit of fancy trick with local javascript (see game of life and starfield for example).
If I don't need, I don't want use something. I don't need a router if I follow the filesystem tree exposed by a simple web server. I don't need full featured javascript library if I can write the effect by myself.
I want local coherency: a single page need its images and stylesheets and extra near. After I saw what Wordpress do with the files, I prefer to keep the space clean. :-) I dislike the crowded common space.
Potentially I want a specific stylesheet for every page. :-)
I want feeds, probably more than one (but this could require a bit of development).
Each article need headers, and yaml ⬀ emerged better than others: it is clearer than json or xml and give me the power I'm searching for. Time ago I was working on a personal solution (every page was similar to email) but yaml has become useful faster.