I’ve been looking into Tufte CSS recently. Tufte CSS -inspired by the teachings of the legendary Edward Tufte¹- provides suggestions and tools to style web articles for improved legibility.

I’ve started to incorporate some of those principles here while still trying to keep the authenticity of my original design. Most of these changes have been in the realm of CSS however the sidenotes feature was a slightly trickier beast.

Jekyll kramdown comes built in with a footnotes feature that I’ve used here for some time. It works pretty well for the most part. The only problem though is -as the names suggests- it displays the notes all the way at the bottom of the articles near the footer.

Two big announcements:

1. I made my first screen cast ¹
2. I’ve updated the permalink title for all the blog posts here ²

I wanted to make sure that external blogs linking to previous post links wouldn’t break. So in order to do this, I had to edit all of my previous blog posts and add a redirect_from tag.

Life is too short to be doing this manually so I whipped up an awk program to do it for me in about 20 minutes. It was so much fun building the program that I figured I should screen cast the process.

This blog now ¹ uses Jekyll - a static blog generator that takes markdown as an input and pumps html as output. I then copy it over to my hosting server - Firebase, which then happily serves it to the interwebs.

This setup has worked out swimmingly well thus far and has been rock solid. Even when my last post got high up the ranks of HN, my blog held steady. Not even the slightest of fears or signs of being fireballed or slashdotted. This is the beauty of HTML.