Quick minor note: I’ve redesigned the art page, grouping the pieces into collections. I’ve also added RSS feeds for all collections and tags (linked from the top of each collection or tag page), so if you’re just interested in the religious art and don’t want to subscribe to the full blog, there’s now an RSS feed for that. There’s also a feed for all the art.
Blog: #meta
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.
And goodness, this is fun. I’m having a blast.
Some small site changes:
- 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.
Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)
I’ve added a scripture reference index for my religious art, to make it easier to find pieces related to specific passages.
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.
I’m back on Twitter. We’ll see it sticks this time. I still see this blog as the main channel for what I do, though.
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.
Small milestone I almost forgot about: this website turned twenty this year.
January 23, 2001. It’s possible I started it before that day, but that’s the first reference to it I’ve found in my journals.
Tinkering on the site all these years has been a delight. Truly one of my favorite activities.