As I’m wrapping and cleaning what appears to be final code, I wanted to review the personal objectives that I had set for myself and by doing so, making sure I’ve adhered to them as best as I could throughout this whole process.

Features and goals

  • Conceived for ease of use and fast loading
  • Consistent layout throughout all entries of the same category
  • Uncluttered design with minimal distractions (apart from wolf pictures, obviously)
  • Soft colour scheme intended as a middle ground between light and dark modes
  • Written with open-source software and current markup languages and syntax
  • Absolutely no ads allowed and no tracking cookies of any kind either
  • Designed to accommodate an insane amount of wolf pictures
  • Page headers with customizable overlays

Software packages

Also, here is the collection of software packages I’m using to write and maintain the site. I’ve added a short description underneath each one in case you’re not already familiar with them. They’re all awesome, open-source and free to use too!

  • Jekyll: A command line program that reads Markdown text files and renders them into static web pages. It doesn’t use databases at all and loads content from YAML and CSS instead, producing much cleaner code as a result. And databases suck anyways.
  • Ruby: An object-oriented programming language which supports multiple paradigms. Its functional and simple nature made it a good fit for my limited set of skills.
  • RubyGems: A package manager that provides a standard format for distributing libraries and applications built in Ruby. This is what powers Jekyll and makes it all work.
  • Handlebars: An export tool that lets you build semantic templates effectively. It is compatible with Jekyll and allows HTML layouts to be precompiled and included as JavaScript code.

And if you’re curious to learn a bit more, here is a list I’ve compiled of all the source code I’m currently using under license.

This is a really fun project for me and I’m looking forward to adding my portfolio and updating the site in the coming months.