Welcome to our World

This site is Under Construction

If you come back soon it should have more content…

What are are we waiting for?

I am re-learning a lot of stuff I knew in the 90s to bring you this site ASAP!

Back then, we were hand-coding all our html, which worked fine, especially given that we were all connecting via dialup, so our code needed to be as tight as possible.

Since then we’ve used all sorts of web development tools, from apps like Dreamweaver and iWeb, to web-based tools like WordPress and Shopify.

But last year, Bill started experimenting with Static web sites, using a tool called Jekyll.

Working with a tool like Jekyll is the modern equivalent of hand-crafting html in a text editor, but with CSS and font choices and lots of things that that the web just didn’t do back in the day.

Jekyll doesn’t stand alone: static websites involve using a pile of small tools that all work together to create a web site that is as robust and fast as possible—all the heavy lifting is done on my local computer then the finished product gets uploaded.

Why?

Good question. Several of the sites that we has been responsible for over the decades have been brought down or subverted by hackers. Static web sites like this are apparently much harder to disrupt. Well, that’s how I interpret Bill’s answer, anyway!

So anyway, it’s taken me a few hours to get this far, and once I’ve got a few more things sorted we’ll have a real web site again.

Now that the basic setup is done, it’s really easy to update, because it uses tools that I already use every day. So maybe I’ll even manage to update it a bit more often than most of my previous attempts!

How?

Page text, like what you’re reading now, is written in Obsidian, which is a writing, hyperlinking, and text management tool that we use for all our knowledge management. It utilises basic text files and a format called Markdown.

The formatting, page layout, html, CSS, and Liquid coding—everything needed to turn the written pages into web pages happens in WebStorm. WebStorm is basically an IDE for web programming.

All the Obsidian WebStorm information goes into a set of folders that are managed by Jekyll in real time. Jekyll does two important tasks for us. Firstly, translates everything handed down to it into the web coding that we will upload at the end of each work session. Secondly, it serves the site up in a browser window in real time, so we can see exactly how the site will look on the web.

Finally, at the end of each writing session, we use Transmit to upload the updates to our site.

Which sounds complicated, and it is. But once it’s set up it’s as easy to use as any other web content system I’ve ever used, in fact, easier than most of them. And we have a great deal of control over how it looks. As an added benefit, our site data isn’t locked away inside somebody else’s system, and there’s nothing on the site that allows malicious code to be injected or hacked. Which I think is worth the extra setup effort.