Blog Adventure

I coded up a new blog today.

The plan was simple: copy the stark minimalism from Ryan Tomayko’s website, the cool ‘link blocks’ from Dave Perrett’s website and make something beautiful.

After a few hours I had a nice looking Jekyll template. Unfortunately, it looked quite a lot like Mr. Tomayko’s blog. Despite having many subtle differences, my homepage felt like a blatant copy of his.

After some thought, I decided that my key problem was that I’d stolen his fonts. Ryan’s homepage and mine both feature the author’s name in huge type, centred at the top of the page. Using the same font really accentuated the plagiarism.

So I went off to cssfontstack to find some fonts of my own. I’m not 100% confident that my choices were good, but I do feel like my web page is legitimately mine now. It looks “inspired by”, not “copied from”.

Font stacks that I like, but didn’t use:

• font-family: Optima, Segoe, “Segoe UI”, Calibri, Arial, sans-serif;
• font-family: ‘Courier New’, Courier, monospace;
• font-family: Calibri, Candara, Segoe, “Segoe UI”, Optima, Arial, sans-serif;

Calibri is often seen on small text, but I found it quite fun for huge text.

Little things

I’m using Sublime to edit this post. Today I learned that Sublime has support for ‘projects’, with a little file browser, and that it has a spell checker. Wonderful.

I spent a lot on food today: $16.50 breakfast, $6 smoothie, $4.50 iced coffee, $16 dinner, $4.50 for milk and chocolate from a diary. That’s $47.50 in total.

My last day of work is coming up quickly. Do I need to start conserving money? It would be easy to cut back – for example, cooking my own breakfast would save $10 per day ($3,650 a year).