site history
This is the 5th iteration of numist.net, and the second with a design I actually like. Unfortunately the other design I was satisfied with was written when I was 10, so I have no real history to share.
You didn't miss much.
The last version of numist.net was thrown away in around 2006 or so. I've come back to hosting myself because of a dissatisfaction with hosted blogging software, both in user interface and in the creative process. I won't claim that this is any easier, but it implements a process between having a thought and sharing it that works for me.
about me
I'm a Canadian in San Francisco.
For fun I hack up hare-brained projects as they strike me, only a few of which have any staying power. The oldest project still running is this might be offensive, the most popular (by traffic to this site) is a teletypewriter.
In the past I've worked as a bus boy, cook, salesman, mechanic, carpenter, forklift operator, and software developer. I have never been unhappy with a job.
Out of habit I use serial commas and (mostly) Canadian English. As the grandson of an English teacher I care about language, so please report any errors you find.
colophon
The design of this blog is based heavily on andre torrez' blog, though I saw the icon set first on FilePile. Andre was not just permissive, but encouraging as I ransacked his design. Other inspiration came from The Ministry of Type and Michael Sippey.
On the right platforms, this site uses Monaco for code and fixed-width text, Georgia for timestamps, and Helvetica for everything else.
The backend of this site is entirely custom-built, and I call it Composing Stick, after the tool in typesetting. It is utterly hare-brained, involving custom markup, many local shell scripts when authoring posts, and a minimum of server-side code for hosting them. Paul also wrote a custom blog engine and his is way better.
copyright
Site content is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
Source code featured in posts is released to the public domain unless otherwise noted.
May you do good and not evil.
