Theme Information

The theme used for this site is called “scratch”… because it was built from scratch as an exercise to understand the details and structure of WordPress themes. It was partially inspired by a WordPress Theme called “ResuMe”. The Scratch theme is an exercise in putting knowledge to work.

The fonts used on this site are Ubuntu and Cutive Mono from Google Fonts.

So What’s A Moleskine?

Other inspiration for the site came from the look and feel of the Moleskine® notebook;  one of my most favorite and most admired tools. They are indispensable for keeping ideas and for documenting the complexities,  joys and wonders of the world we live in. The physical joy of a well worn Moleskine notebook (partnered with a .07 Zebra black pen) doesn’t easily transfer to the Web but I hope I have at least done it as must justice as I am able.

Moleskine® is a registered trademark of Moleskine Srl. I love their products and will recommend them to anyone who asks!

Site Credits

Music: I am a lover of all kinds of music. I find that it helps me to think and generate ideas. I never have believed that music should be used as “background noise” so there are times when I was creating this site and writing content that I just stopped and listened.

Thanks to Bach, Liszt, Enya and many other musical geniuses for helping me to put together this site.

Tools

My development environment for this site and other tasks is in the cloud. Thanks to Host Excellence for hosting this site and ShiftEdit IDE for giving me an editing environment that can be dragged wherever there is a computer (and good music). Chrome Developer Tools still remains my favorite. I remember the days before these developer tools existed and still wonder how anyone efficiently wrote CSS!

It’s More Than Just The Words

“In order to expand audience awareness and redefine Possible, there have to be places where these new capabilities exist; and lacking a client willing to take the chance that the audience will be equipped to do so, we need to provide the environment so the audience equips itself and creates that demand to use newer standards. I propose, therefore, that the environment already exists and it lives in the collective personal sites that don’t give a damn about return on investment.”

– Lance Arthur Redefining Possible January 22, 1999

Personal sites, our blogs, these were once our playgrounds. My own site was the first place I added rollover images, CSS for fonts, tried out a “table free” design. I wrote about the web, surrounded by my own experiments with the web. We all did, and it was only in reading those words from 1999 that I realised there was more to owning your own content than simply not publishing your words elsewhere.

As we move our code to CodePen, our writing to Medium, our photographs to Instagram we don’t just run the risk of losing that content and the associated metadata if those services vanish. We also lose our own place to experiment and add personality to that content, in the context of our own home on the web.

I had already decided to bring my content back home in 2017, but I’d also like to think about this idea of using my own site to better demonstrate and play with the new technologies I write about. It’s more than just the words.

(Credit: Cross posted from here  – because it expresses exactly the reason why this site exists)