This is Chad’s occasional blog - where I put things that don’t fit into the family-activities-oriented Chad-o-Matic blog or our project-focused blog over at Toeshark Industries. If you’re looking for my CV, it’s over here.

In January 2020 I migrated this blog away from Google’s Blogger system, more for variety than any particular dissatisfaction with Blogger, but also to have greater control over the content to ensure I can get to it in the distant, unpredictable future. Blogger makes it very easy to do many nifty things (like include your latest Twitter posts in a sidebar!) that are not as easy here, but it’s non-trivial to use your material in another form if you later decide to do something different. I appreciate the clarity and focus I can get this way – fewer distractions, maybe you’ll read more closely what I’ve written.

One thing I wanted to try, post-Blogger, is one of the static site generators now so widely used. I looked at several, and decided to use Jekyll. Jekyll has been around foa few years, and is in wide use and under active development. It’s also supported by GitHub Pages, which was another aspect of “modern website deployment” that I wanted to try, but a Jekyll-based site can just as easily be deployed to any old webserver, so I’m not locked in to any specific host.

I considered lots of themes for this blog, including rolling a new one of my own (nothing new for me, since I wrote websites the old-fashioned plain-and-simple HTML way in the very earliest days of the interwebz) but, as I’ve long been a fan of Edward Tufte’s design aesthetic, and Clay Harmon went to the trouble to build a very nice Jekyll theme that embodies Tufte’s style, I decided to run with that. It’s taken some work to make it function well for my unique purposes, but I’m deeply appreciative of Clay’s efforts upon which I’ve built.