RidingTheClutch.com

All two of my regular readers may have noticed a pretty big change on Friday—a complete redesign of the site! I went back to my typographic roots and was heavily inspired by The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. Highly recommended as a great overview and history of typography and the written/printed word in general. The site looks best in Adobe Caslon Pro but you’re probably seeing it in Georgia. Not ideal, but better than Arial.

A change you probably didn’t notice was my switch from Mephisto to Jekyll as my blogging engine. Jekyll was written by my friend Tom in Ruby. It’s very different than your normal blogging engine—there’s no admin, no templates and it’s not a hosted solution. You create your posts as individual files, optionally marked up with Textile or Markdown, and point an executable at them. It takes those files, formats them and outputs your site as static html files. Upload these to your server and you’re done! Jekyll has no concept of comments (yet) so I plugged in the simple comment system by Disqus.

I’ve got a handy little script that builds the site with Jekyll and then publishes to my server via rsync, all in one short command called rtc. Add something like the following to your .bash_profile (pretend it’s all on one line). These options will make more sense once you take a look at the Jekyll readme):

["\nalias rtc=\"echo 'Building...' && ~/Sites/rtc/jekyll/bin/jekyll \\\n--pygments ~/Sites/rtc/raw ~/Sites/rtc/site && echo 'Pushing...' \\\n&& rsync -avz --delete ~/Sites/rtc/site/ rob@myserver.com:/var/www/rtc/\"\n"]

I’m still working on the design, but it’s a start.