Traditionally, colophons were a publisher’s emblem or imprint to give information about its authorship and printing. Instead, here I describe the ideas, tooling, and organization behind this creative work. You can learn more about the purpose and content of this website, as well as the author … elsewhere.
Design & Imagery 🎨
The site layout is powered by Foundation 5, primarily to take advantage of it’s responsive grid system. All the styling on top of that is my own creative expression of a timeless and minimalistic design.
The favicon (the little crown) is derived from my logo (encircled crown) was designed by me. I love colour and the shifting chameleon colours on this site provided a fun way for me to incorporate that into my design while maintaining minimalism.
Tech & Tools 🛠️
The entire website is a static website that is generated by Jekyll. Hosting is via GitHub Pages which in turn is configured with this GitHub repository. I just edit, commit the changes, push, and my changes are live!
The sitemap and feeds for the articles & thoughts, blog and code minutae sections are all generated using Jekyll’s Liquid templates.
All the feeds are Atom 1.0 feeds. I don’t use the
jekyll-feed plugin, because it didn’t exist at the time I
created this site. Also because of the way I’ve chosen to structure my site into
different segments (more on this below).
JavaScript is kept to a minimum on this site, however I’ve used a few small libraries here and there (mostly for fun). I use:
- Highlight.js to format code blocks where I share code.
- Modernizr.js for all its shims, fallbacks, and polyfills in order to implant HTML5 functionality in browsers that don’t natively support it.
- NProgress.js to provide realistic trickle animations on page load.
- Turbolinks.js (Classic) to provide some speedup from not having to download or parse the CSS & JS files on every page load.
On the styling front, I have:
- FontAwesome.css which is a icon library + toolkit.
- Normalize.css to makes browsers render all elements more consistently and in line with modern standards.
My current preferred code editor is VSCode. It’s free plus there are tonnes of extensions such as the markdownlint extension which really comes in handy while working on this site.
Structure & Breakdown 🗄️
This site has it’s own unique structure. I’ll break it down to you below:
- Articles & Thoughts – short snippets of smart ideas that I came across on the Internet (title of the post usually links back to the source).
- Blog – long form posts which comprise of my own writing.
- Code Minutae – snippets of code that I thought of sharing.
- Pages – standalone pages that don’t fit any of the above categories such as this page and the about page.