About this Blog

Many developments in computer science have nothing to do with the capabilities of computers, but with the way we use them.

A few years ago, an article on Airbag Industries¹ inspired me to think about writing a blog with a unique design per post.

There are many benefits:

• It encourages creativity both at the computer and away from it
• It’s like a code kata for design
• You can easily experiment with cutting-edge CSS3 features or just learn CSS2
• You’ll learn how to build a style foundation for other designs in other applications

On the downside, it takes more time than simply writing prose.

Building an art-directed blog may seem as easy as dropping an extra CSS link tag into every blog post, but a little extra work upfront makes it a lot easier.

First, I started with a layout grid in CSS. Grids have been used extensively in print design but have only recently become popular in website design. I like Tyler Tate’s 1kb grid² because it’s the simplest thing necessary to accomplish the task.

In standard website design, elements can be placed anywhere on a page. In contrast, a grid defines boundaries in regular increments, limiting the possibilities. Instead of stifling creativity, it encourages experimentation by making it easier to think about a finite number of widths for text or images.

I use a 12 column grid (double-click anywhere on this page to see it). Twelve columns are easily divided into other increments: 12 · 6+6 · 2+5+5 · 4+4+4 · 3+3+3+3

The Sinatra web framework has a beautiful REST API, can be extremely powerful, and is super fast.

It’s easily deployed with Phusion Passenger alongside my other Rack-based web applications.

I started with the Nesta⁴ blog engine and enhanced it with the additional CSS and graphic generation features I needed. All pages are cached statically with Sinatra::Cache⁵ for even greater speed. Although this blog could be generated with a static site generator, I find it more natural to write it in a dynamic style.

One example is the generation of text headline images with the Textorize⁶ renderer from Thomas Fuchs. I reference the images by URL in my CSS files. Sinatra generates the graphic on the fly when that URL is accesed (then caches it). Sinatra keeps URLs at the forefront of the web developer’s mind — where they should be!

Other resources are generated at the view level when needed. Code snippets are formatted by the Pygments⁷ command-line script via a special RedCloth tag implemented as a Haml filter.

It’s much eaiser to debug a visual design in development on the local machine, check the whole thing into Git, and deploy when ready. No need to write an authentication system or an article preview mechanism.

Article files are stored on disk with a bit of YAML-esque metadata at the top. Each article can be in Textile format, or can use the full power of Haml for more complicated markup.

Early on I needed to store information about the title’s font size and color. Later I needed to add other custom fields for additional tagging. With an ORM this would have meant writing a migration and installing a plugin to manage tags.

There was no such problem here! I just added a few key-value pairs to the article’s metadata and started using them in the application immediately.

Not only does each post get its own CSS, it can also specify its own HTML, via Haml⁸.

When I’m designing visually in the browser, I’m thinking primarily about blocks of text and images, and how they will be styled. I don’t want to be thinking about HTML boilerplate or need to hunt to find a matching end tag.

Haml decreases the mental distance between HTML and CSS. I work directly with CSS selectors no matter what file I happen to be in.

But Haml isn’t well suited to working with inline text. Fortunately, there’s Textile⁹ for that!

The differences between the basic syntaxes of Textile and Markdown are negligible. Where it pulls away from Markdown is when you add new tags of your own. You can write view helpers that take a simple string and turn it into a group of HTML tags. It’s not only faster to type, but I can build reusable elements for movie links, syntax-highlighted code snippets, pull quotes, and product boxes.

Textile enhancements are easily used inline within any Haml document. In RedCloth 4, the steps are:

• Write a module with methods for each of the tags you want to use (such as movie at right).
• In each method, examine the :text key in the options, then build and return an HTML string. I build links for the mov and m4v versions of each movie.
• Write a Haml filter. The name of your module will be used as the name of the filter.
• Extend RedCloth with your custom module.
• Add more methods to your tags module as needed.

The code samples at right were built this way. I specify a path to a source file and it runs it through pygmentize. It also prepends a link to the source file itself.

The end result is a text system customized for writing about code, but it looks great, too! I can’t imagine using a CMS that was any less powerful than this.

In a recent copy of Print Magazine¹¹, someone talked about designing a “style sheet” for the magazine back in the 70’s. For some reason, the extra space jolted my brain into thinking differently. Style. Sheet.

A stylesheet isn’t supposed to be a receptacle into which one tosses a bunch of unrelated visual directives. It’s a coherent guideline for how things should look. It should be planned and reusable. And like backend code, it may take several iterations of use in the real world to get it right.

SASS is a huge part of achieving that concept in this blog.

People get emotional when they hear about SASS. Either they see it as a threat to traditional CSS (used only by hacks who haven’t taken the time to learn it) or they welcome it as the best thing to happen to the Internet.

After working with this blog for a few months, I’m in the second camp.

As an example, any page can be designed with a light or a dark background. A few mixins at the top automatically adjust the page background, logo color (implemented as an image sprite), and menu colors. All these are contained in the stylesheet and don’t require any modification of the page’s HTML.

The technical parts of the grid and vertical rhythm are also wired into my SASS stylesheets. I can give elements meaningful names in HTML, then specify +grid_6 in SASS to make the element six columns wide (alternately, I could have used arguments like grid(6)).

Variables like grid_gutter_width and line_height are available to the whole application. I rarely type a number; instead I use meaningful variables to add margins or manipulate elements into position.

_grid.sass

And if I’m going to spend that much time in the powder room, I want to show it off. The archives page uses webkit2png.py¹⁰ to take a screenshot of each page and display it in a grid.

A unique design for each post is great, but how about unique JavaScript for each post?

For my Rails 3 upgrade screencast, I wanted to show a timeline of Rails release dates. I’ve recently become enamored with RaphaelJS¹² and it took only a few lines of code to import a JavaScript file for posts that want one.

I wrote a custom Timeline function that plots dates as large dots.

Conclusion

As with many features of this blog, it will take a while to figure out how to use them all fully. In the meantime, it’s a great learning experience and a fun output for creativity.

I haven’t published the source yet and may never. But now you have the ideas…implement them on your own blog!