Colophon

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

A lot of moving parts are inherent to the development of a blog, journal, website, or other digital artifact. This describes the tools and components used, and the usage rights applied in the development, management, and publishing of Errant Ruminant's digital presence.

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 found published to this website is available under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC by-NC-SA 4.0 Int.) license, or any later version.

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

Rights associated to 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

• Cloud server provider: Vultr.com
  One VPS instance shared between three sites: Tandem Farms, Tandem Realty, and Errant Ruminant.
• Operating system: Fedora Linux
  Latest version or one version removed.
• Front-end: the Ghost publishing platform, self-hosted
  Want to do the same? Reference these instructions.
• Backup: scripted backup saved to the Keybase Filesystem.

Development Tools

• Todd's laptop: Fedora Linux workstation
• Image manipulation: GIMP and Inkscape
• Offline document development and brainstorming: Joplin
  Instructions for installing Joplin on Fedora Linux can be found here.

Images, Text and Fonts, Color Pallet

Image formatting

Imagery is edit and manipulated using the Inkscape and GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP software applications. Complex custom content is often developed first in Inkscape, saved as a SVG vector graphic, then outputted to a PNG graphic, and if need by, scaled down and cropped using GIMP. Individual components needed by an Inkscape project (example, individual raster images), are usually edited in GIMP first, utilized by Inkscape, with the resultant export, again edited with GIMP.

There is a constant struggle to balance beautiful imagery with the needs to of the internet (size of image).

Image dimensions for the website

• Article header images and those that span the breadth of an article: 800px wide.
• Cover: Width should be approximately 1/2 Height (example, 600x1200)
• Icon: 60x60px
• Logo: 600x72px
• Profile: 600x600px
• Post/Entry images: 1000px+ for full width
  . . . more to come . . .

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 Fonts

This website runs atop the open source Ghost publishing platform and utilizes the Massively theme (customized through styling and adjusted templates).

The site structure has been customized to lead with a landing page. While pages remain pages, /blog/ follows native blog-ish structure.

Header text is generally set to Avería Sans Libre with a fallback to Fira Sans Book, and then finally to a generic 'sans-serif'.

General text is set to the Libre Caslon Text font, falling back to generic serif.

Monospaced text is set to Fira Mono, and then finally to a generic 'monospaced'.

More technical content has text content set to 'Fira Sans Book' and 'Fira Mono'.

Other specific use cases may call for one-off usage of various fonts, such as Chilanka, Fira Sans Book, Crimson Text, Croscore Cursor, Overpass, and Overpass Mono

The corresponding css font properties may look like this.

/* headers */
font-family: MyAveriaSans, 'Fira Sans Book', sans-serif; /* h1 */
font-family: MyAveriaSans, sans-serif; /* other headers */
font-weight: 900;
/* text */
font-family: MyCaslon, serif;
/* code/pre-formatted */
font-family: 'Fira Mono',  monospace;

/* alternative content: technical */
/* text */
font-family: 'Fira Sans Book', sans-serif;
/* code */
font-family: 'Fira Mono', monospace;

/* alternative content: cursive */
/* headers */
font-family: MyAveriaSans, sans-serif;
/* text*/
font-family: MyChilanka, MyAveriaSerif, serif;

Text color:

• off-black with a hint of blue: color: #212931;  
• links:
  • visited/link - dark umber: color: #3b2609ff;  
  • hover - light umber: color: #ae6f1aff;   and sometimes light blue: color: #18bfef;  

General color palette

Shades of gray with occasional splashes of color. Dark background. Light foreground (content region). Off-black, bluish text (see above).

Styling

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

^* Translation: "O most gracious reader, wash your hands and touch the book only like this: turn the pages softly and keep your finger far away from the text". —source: Colophon (publishing), Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia