My website would not be possible without the help of an assortment of open-source, poorly documented tools.¹ Get your modern browser running because I am now living in an HTML5 world and leaving those Luddites still stuck in IE6 behind with their eight-track players and rabbit-ear TV sets. I started my site with the instructive but super-heavy HTML5 Boilerplate and stripped out the parts that didn’t look interesting or necessary.

I discovered HAML for coding my page structure. HAML is a Ruby/Rails-based interpreter and HTML de-uglifier whose syntax is fairly straightforward while its usage is less so, especially for someone who speaks about as much Ruby as he speaks Hungarian. (Szia, világ!) HAML on its own lacks support for partial templates, so I wrapped the HAML, and the rest of my files, with the site-builder tool Middleman, whose workflow is what the engineers call orthogonal to my own.

My JavaScript framework of choice is jQuery along with the jQuery UI.

My content, which is primarily long paragraphs of text like this one, comes formatted courtesy of Maruku. Middleman used to have native Maruku support, but the latest version dropped it in favor of some other text-to-HTML conversion scheme that I don’t want to take the time to learn. It’s still possible to interpolate Maruku via HAML’s filter and Ruby’s IO like this:

:maruku
  #{File.read('path/from/middleman/home/to/maruku/file')}

Not exactly elegant, but it works.

If you’re using a browser that doesn’t support CSS3 and you still churn your own butter, my site probably won’t render correctly. The pretty-printed LaTeX math comes from the cumbersome MathJax library.

The .gif files are probably stolen off other websites, but the .jpegs were all photographed and GIMP-ed by me. By which I mean, I applied random GIMP filters and made color balance changes without a clue what exactly I was doing.

Much thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, for inventing the web.