This is a minimalist web site: I do not care about fancy graphics or nitfy effects. I do care, however, about content and I want you to read what I write comfortably. As you can see, this site has no sidebars: it only has a header, a main column and a footer, exactly where you expect them to be. The source code of this site follows W3C’s XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 standard.
As of version 8, h3rald.com is a completely static web site, except for a few AJAX calls. All the files are generated automatically thanks to the Nanoc publishing system, an ingenious creation of Denis Defreyne. Nanoc can be used to easily create static web sites using Ruby, as explained in this article.
The following ruby libraries (gems) have been used to create this web site:
- nanoc, to generate the entire web site
- extlib, in some custom Rake tasks
- bb-ruby, for the BBCode filter
- builder, to create RSS and ATOM feeds
- haml, for the SASS filter
- glyph, for the Glyph filter
Additionally, the following gems were necessary to migrate from the previous version of this web site, powered by Typo:
Besides Ruby-related dependencies, the following was also necessary:
- pygments, a Python library for code highlighting.
- prince, a program to generate PDF files from HTML.
- A cron job to fetch backtype comments, delicious bookmarks, tweets, and github commits in JSON format and save them to the
/output/datafolder.
My articles and all content published on this web site is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. For other uses, contact me.
The source code of this web site, such as its layout, SASS/CSS stylesheets, Nanoc tasks and code is licensed under the terms of the BSD License and it is available on GitHub.
I’d like to thank the following people for their work, which made this web site possible:
- Denis Defreyne, for creating the wonderful Nanoc site publishing system.
- David J.Perry, who designed the Cardo font I used for the H3RALD logo and the navigation buttons.
- The staff of Archive.org, for scanning the first edition of A Complete Guide to Heraldry, and making it available to the public. All the images featuring heraldic monsters are taken from this book.
As of version 8, h3rald.com is a completely static web site, except for a few AJAX calls. All the files are generated automatically thanks to the Nanoc publishing system, an ingenious creation of Denis Defreyne. Nanoc can be used to easily create static web sites using Ruby, as explained in this article.