NC

For a project several weeks in the making, I’ve just pushed up the changes to this, my site. I started working on all of this way back when I was still on placement, but then also through Young Rewired State and intermittently since. It’s been at once the bane of my todo list, and a joy to work on, experimenting, refactoring and of course, writing.

It’s in no-way perfect, but it’s a significant improvement from my orignal version.

Like most of my projects, it’s also up on GitHub.

Posts

There’s a few posts which I’ve finally been able to post. Most of these had been sat around as drafts, others needed a bit of completion. But, without further ado, my last few months:

• NSConf Mini: Developers vs. Designers
• dConstruct 2012
• Young Rewired State 2012
• Finishing at Rokk Media

I’m now a good few weeks into the final-year of my degree and so my focus has (necessarily) shifted quite a bit. My focus from now on will be mostly centred around Python, Qt (using PyQt and some OpenGL), Robotics, GPU Computation using CUDA and various AI topics. I already have a few drafts relating to these in the works (I find it a great way to learn). I will also be occasionally posting about my degree project — a Quadrotor platform, Simulator and associated mapping algorithms. It’s going to be an interesting year.

A Colophon

This version is based upon Hakyll. It’s a static site generator written in Haskell. Before this, I tried out multiple others, from Hyde to Mynt, and the original, Jekyll. But each had issues in one sense or another and didn’t work all that well for me. Obviously, your requirements will vary.

But, the key part of Hakyll is it’s use of pandoc. This is a document conversion tool (also written in Haskell) that I’ve since started using for generating documents for print. It also had the Markdown extensions that I wanted (footnotes, citations, LaTeX maths support, tables, etc.)

The design itself is responsive¹ — albeit, not tested absolutely everywhere — but not mobile first (because I’d written it desktop first), I’ll probably fix this at some point.

It uses TypeKit to provide “Proxima Nova” for headings, and “Adelle” for the body text. The icons are font-icons from Pictos Server.

Syntax highlighting is provided in <pre> and <code> blocks using Pygments. Mathematics symbols are through MathJax.

It’s deployed by pushing a Git repository to a VPS hosted with Prgmr.com, which I’ve used for several years now.

for side projects like this.