I've set up multiple blogs in the past, but they all felt unorganized and unwieldy to use. So, my goal with this new iteration was to keep it clean, simple, and above all organized in a manner that made sense to me. So, I built Willow, which started as a manual clone of the Jekyll static generator, but has since evolved into its own. While the world certainly didn't need a new static generator, I wanted something that would fit my own needs as well as be an educational experience while diving deeper into the Ruby development environment.

Design

The design was inspired by a mashup of several sites that seemed clean and organized to me: Mark Reid, Rodrigo Galindez, Jon Tangerine, Jekyll Bootstrap, Github, Scripting News, and the Skeleton Framework.

• The underlying css framework is based off of the Skeleton framework.
• The social icons come from Komodo Media (the github icon came from Hello! Burin).
• The highlighted syntax for code snippets is based off of the Railscasts theme using CodeRay.
• I used this ASCII text generator to create the 404 image using the "Doh" font.
• All other images, text, or design styles are either attributed individually or are my own fault.

Mechanics

I write this site in the Mac version of the Vim text editor using a combination of Mustache and Markdown syntax.

I combine all of the site files into a readable form using my own Willow system, which adds headers, creates indexes, generates feeds, and processes css and javascript using Sprockets. The source is then neatly tucked away inside a git repository on Github. I then rsync the site to it's final destination on the web.

License

Unless otherwise specified, the writing section of this site and all stories are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License.

Unless otherwise specified, the site and programming sections of this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License.