After a decently long stint with Literata as the font on this site, I’ve switched to EBC Garamond. It’s my personal fork of the 8 pt size of EB Garamond — I like thicker fonts that don’t feel quite so digital, and the 8 pt version has that. I’ve fixed some glyph collisions (in the small caps), modified some of the glyphs I wasn’t happy with (widening the /p/, for example), turned off some default ligatures, and fine-tuned the kerning. This is still very much a work in progress and there are still changes I want to make, but it feels ready enough for use here.
A note on process: I opened the original SFDs from the repo in FontForge and exported UFOs. I’m using Fontra (which I’m quite liking, by the way) to edit the glyphs, and I hand-edit the OpenType feature definitions in Vim. I use fontmake to generate OTFs and pyftsubset to convert them to WOFF2. And I have a little testbed HTML file that I use to check in-browser whether I’m happy with the changes. It’s a decent dev experience.
I’ve added a timeline page, listing the types of projects I’ve worked on each year. (A chronological view of my work to complement the topical view already on here. And mostly just because I’m a nerd and like making charts.)
I recently redesigned the reading log to be more compact.
After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wanted to provide a more lightweight way for readers to respond to posts (email can feel a little too formal sometimes) without adding comments to the site itself, and I think this is it.
I’ve started adding short reviews to the reading log, to make the page a little more useful. Just the 2022 reads so far, but I plan to keep going back as far as I can.
After nine months of issue blogging (posting issues of Prints), I’ve decided it’s time to return to stream blogging.
A quick retrospective: publishing issues was fine (the structure helped, for example), but for a personal blog I’m now less convinced that it’s the right fit. Looking forward to posting more freely and frequently.
Today was my last day at Cedar (formerly OODA Health before the acquisition), and on Monday I start a new job at Hologram.
I’m finally getting around to writing Cast, the new backend engine for this site. The plan is to go full static and deploy via Render. Also planning to move my personal apps over. While I’m still probably a couple months away from having everything migrated, I’m so, so looking forward to not maintaining a personal server anymore. (It’s fun, sure, and I’ve learned a lot, but it’s stressful — yesterday’s Let’s Encrypt root certificate expiration bit me thanks to an old OpenSSL version, for example — and it’s no longer something I want to spend time on for personal projects.)
