Jashank Jeremy

Current State of Play

This site is hosted on a VPS from Octopus Computing in Sydney.

The site is built using Jekyll and a range of evil hacks written in Ruby for some semidynamic content generation.

The current style is look-14.01, codename ‘SIGURG’. I wanted to lighten and tidy up the page layout. The content fonts are Lato and TeX Gyre Pagella.

This version of the site (15.01.00) was (re)built at 2015-01-19 09:06:07 +1100.

Technical History

Mostly, I avoid using big hairy website engines (although I have had brief forays into Google Sites and Windows Spaces), and prefer to write my own code to generate and manage the sites, typically as a shell hack or with some nifty Perl.

In recent years, I’ve found John McFarlane’s Pandoc utility does wonders for these things, and I still use it as a Swiss-army knife of content format transformations.

This site, however, is brought together with the power and the glory of Tom Preston-Werner’s Jekyll transformer, to which I’ve also contributed.

From August 2012 to January 2013, this site was built with Bootstrap by Twitter, with icons from Glpyhicons Free (licensed under CC-BY 3.0).

Nowadays, it is transformed into a monster by Jekyll running on Ruby, with RVM.

Style History

look-13.01 codename ‘SIGBUS’

In January 2013, I tidied up a lot. I migrated away from Bootstrap, Glyphicons and Pandoc in my website build, and had a fairly major patch (faster_lsi) integrated into Jekyll. I switched to Kramdown for the Markdown transform, and wrote my own style sheets.
look-13.02 codename ‘SIGSEGV’
look-13.03 codename ‘SIGSYS’

In February and March I cleaned up the styles, for look-13.02 and look-13.03, ‘SIGSEGV’ and ‘SIGSYS’, respectively.
look-13.05 codename ‘SIGPIPE/reboot’

In May I switched back to Twitter Bootstrap, version 2.3, for the styling and theming.
look-13.08 codename ‘SIGALRM’

Over the three months before this update, I’d been doing a variety of odd web design jobs, culminating in the construction of the Alpine Charters website. I learned a lot of things about doing web construction right during this time, and integrated them into the first major revamp of the styles and the content in a while. The changes were so big, in fact, that I even bothered to branch the Git repo that I keep this site in, to hack on.
look-13.09 codename ‘SIGTERM’

My aim this time around was to use what I’d learned on my big design job in the last month to simplify and clean up the page layout, while making the site blend together neatly.
look-14.01 codename ‘SIGURG’

I had a poke at Bootstrap, and get something that works. It doesn’t look like Bootstrap, true, but it is.

The photos

We like our photography. We look for nice cameras and tend to use them a lot. Our photos have been taken with a range of cameras including a Sony Cybershot, an Olympus FE-210 then a FE-310 (by far the worst camera I’ve ever used), a Canon PowerShot SX20 IS, an Olympus E-PL1, an Olympus E-P3, as well as a pair of Huawei Ideos phones which take ‘all right’ pictures. I also have about five years experience with DSLRs – mostly with Canon EOS cameras, but I’ve used Olympus and Nikon DSLRs, too.

All of these photos I took or was very close to the person taking them, and these are all from the photo collection that my family has slowly been assembling since our first digital camera in 2003. Our photo collection sits on our media tank, and is something like 85GB in size. They were carefully trimmed with netpbm (and occasional help from Adobe’s Photoshop). Photograph information was extracted with exiftool, part of Perl’s Image::ExifTool module.