Colophon
cor·pus |‘kôrpəs| noun — A collection of written texts, esp. the entire works of a particular author or a body of writing on a particular subject: the Darwinian corpus. — New Oxford American Dictionary
Style and Structure
My intention for the site is to be easy to read with minimal intrusion and competition for your attention. Everything is HTML5 and CSS3 underneath with well-formed and semantic mark-up. The site is responsive, to provide a good experience across a desktop, tablet or phone.
Relying on evolving standards means some browsers aren’t going to show the site exactly as intended. If you’re using a recent browser, you’ll be fine.
Font faces: The body text is set in Georgia. Lucida Grande is used for minor accents. Headlines are set it Helvetica Neue. Backup fonts are specified.
Software
Several tools are used to make the site. While not all of the software below is open source, I am greatly appreciative to the open source communities that build and maintain several of the tools I use.
- BBEdit is the text editor I’ve used since 1999 and it has never once sucked
- Aperture is my preferred tool for editing and processing photographs, as long as it keeps running
- Safari is my primary development browser
- Google Chrome is my sanity-check browser
- MiddleMan is the Ruby-based static-site generator that runs walls.corpus
- Sass allows me to think of CSS as code
- Apache 2.4 is the granddaddy httpd and what the site is served by
- BlueCloth is a Ruby implementation of John Gruber’s Markdown
- rubypants is a Ruby implementation of Smarty Pants
Hosting
walls.corpus runs on a DigitalOcean server.
Practices and Style
Tip of the hat
My site is influenced by and benefits from reading and reviewing the work of several CSS and design luminaries and web minimalists.
- John Gruber’s Daring Fireball
- Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction
- Dave Shea’s Mezzoblue
- Jeffery Zeldman Presents
- A List Apart