Tech Specs
Front-end
minimal design is hand coded with love and TextMate which is without a doubt the greatest text editor available for OS X. If you’d like to know more about the code, refer to my Accessibility Statement and the Validation page.
All the graphic elements were created with Photoshop, no surprise there…
To get the headers to display in Myriad Pro Condensed, I use sIFR.
For the “Web 2.0” popup in the Portfolio, I use a slightly tweaked version of Slimbox.
My contact information uses microformats, and the vCard download is powered by Brian Suda’s X2V project.
Back-end
The CMS behind everything is TextPattern. For those of you wondering if they should go with TextPattern or WordPress, I’d say that if you’re going to blog, you should definitely go with WordPress because it is much easier to use out of the box, and the defaults are usually well thought out. But if you need to build a more unique website, especially in terms of structure, then TextPattern is much more flexible.
In order to get TextPattern to do things my way, I wrote a couple of PHP functions and installed the following plugins (I had to tweak some of them though).
- ajw_comment_alt
- ajw_if_comment_owner
- asv_recent_comments
- cbs_category_list
- gbp_permanent_links
- mta_article_id
- rss_admin_db_manager
- rss_live_search
- rss_suparchive
Hosting
minimal design is hosted by A Small Orange and loving it. I monitored a bunch of different hosting companies for a week before I picked ASO. Their uptime, speed, and consistency is great, and their tech support never took more than 30 mn to get back to me with concise, friendly, and helpful answers. On top of that they’re very reasonably priced and their website looks good. If you’re in search of the perfect place to host your site, give them a try, they have a 30 day money back policy. If you decide to go with them, it would be great if you used the referral link above to thank me for the good advice ;)