How I rebuilt my website in the modern age
I’m rebuilding this website. Its 2016. So, no more WordPress.
What do I want to achieve?
- A place to publish posts that I own, even if I do post them to Medium as well
- An easy way to list talks I’ve given, and to get in touch to book me for more (if anyone still does that)
- A place to publish my training materials
…And I want to be able to create it all using Markdown, locally.
There are a few steps I need to take.
- Pick a blogging/publishing platform, which, due to my desire to use Markdown locally will need to be a static site generator. TLDR: Hugo
- Host the content somewhere it can live on and be accessed in a raw form, even if I am no longer around. TLDR: Github, which also covers the version control
- Decide where to host the live site. Considering Dropbox and Github
- Figure out how to quickly deploy to my Host
Design
Font
The starting point for me was to pick a font.
Some decisions:
- Which font provider? Last I worked with webfonts, I made use of the now shuttered local service fontdeck and Typekit. As my budget is limited, and I’m no designer, it seems the best place to find fonts now is Google Fonts.
- Serif or sans-serif? According to this infographic, sans-serif is the way forward. Medium uses serif however, and it seems to be gaining ground. Serif for me.
- Which font? Filtering Google fonts for ‘Sans serif’, ‘Serif’ and ‘display’ turns up plenty to pick from, including Google’s own Noto collection.
Google Fonts is very easy to set up.
To use the same fonts as this site, add this to the html head tag:
<link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Noto+Serif:400,400italic,700' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
…and to the css:
font-family: 'Noto Sans', sans-serif;