O beatissime lector, lava manus tuas et sic librum adprehende, leniter folia turna, longe a littera digito pone.^*

A lot of moving parts are used to develop and maintain a blog, journal, website, or other digital artifact. This page inventories the tools and components used to keep Errant Ruminant standing. Additionally, this page houses the bare bones privacy policy that we follow and articulates the usage rights for anything published here.

Your Privacy

This website is built upon the Ghost publishing platform which also natively manages subscribers and memberships. Bulk emails are sent via an API call to the MailGun email service. And all money exchange is handled by Stripe. I will not sell your data and I will not share your data beyond what is required to run these services.

I'm just a dude that writes and ruminates and some of you find it interesting enough to subscribe, and some even to sponsor me. I appreciate your interest. That's the extent of my privacy policy. I hope you enjoy my ramblings and whatnot. Have a wonderful day.

Content Licensing

    Only one thing is impossible for God:
    To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
    —Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Unless otherwise indicated, all content published to this website is available under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC by-NC-SA 4.0 Int.) license.

A summary of the terms of this license is available, as well as its detailed terms.

Rights associated with the trademarks and service marks of Errant Ruminant, as well as the look and feel of this website, are not licensed under the terms mentioned above. However, I support you making full use of your rights under fair use, fair dealing and other exceptions and limitations.

Technical Construction

Basic Infrastructure (the stack)

• Cloud server provider: Vultr.com
  One VPS instance shared between this website and two others.

• Operating system: Fedora Linux
  Latest version or one version removed.

• Front-end: the Ghost publishing platform, self-hosted

• Bulk email: Mailgun

• Shop and Tipping: was BuyMeACoffee, now is Ko-Fi

• Money exchange: Stripe

• Backup: shell scripts and SyncThing.

Development Tools

• Todd's desktop: Fedora Linux workstation
• Image manipulation: GIMP and Inkscape
• Offline document development, brainstorming, and all of my writing: Joplin

Text and Fonts, Color Pallet

Content development

This site's content (articles and blog/journal entries) is developed offline (see Joplin above) and formatted as Markdown, which is then uploaded directly to the Ghost platform CMS with little or no adjustment.

Theme and Typefaces

This website runs atop the open source Ghost publishing platform and utilizes the Ease theme (customized through styling and adjusted templates). The site structure has been customized with a flat hierarchy for pages (with one leading landing page) and all blog (newletter) entries organized beneath /blog/.

Typography

• Header and Display text: Avería Sans.
• Main content: Crimson Text.
• Monospaced content and more technical content: Fira Mono and Fira Code. Though Courier Prime Code, Source Code Pro, and others slip in there.
• Other specific use cases may call for one-off usage of various fonts, such as Chilanka and more.

Color palette

Shades of gray with occasional splashes of color. Shaded "desktop" background with a light, page-like foreground (content region).

• Ease theme text - gray: color: #333f; color: rgb(51 51 51 / 1.0);  
• Ease theme header text - darker gray: color: #15171aff; color: rgb(21 23 26 / 1.0);  
• Ease theme <pre> background-color: lighter gray: color: #f6f6f6ff; rgb(246 246 246 / 1.0);  
• Ease theme link text - darker gray v2: color: #1a1815ff; rgb(26 24 21 / 1.0);  
• Ease theme link text, hovered - darker gray v2 @ 80%: color: #1a1815cc; rgb(26 24 21 / 0.8);  
  
  
• Adjusted theme text - off-black with a hint of blue: color: #212931ff; color: rgb(33 41 49 / 1.0);  
• Adjusted theme link - dark umber: color: #3b2609ff; color: rgb(59 38 9 / 1.0);  
• Adjusted theme link, hovered - dark umber @ 80%: color: #3b2609cc; color: rgb(59 38 9 / 0.8);  

• Adjusted theme link, one-off - light blue: color: #18bfefff; color: rgb(24 191 239 / 1.0);  

Styling (language)

The Chicago Manual of Style is adhered to, until it is not.