Why plain HTML? —
Mainly because it’s fast and clean. I hate being on slow WiFi and a website I’m trying to load lags. I refuse to participate in making people wait. I’m a punctual person. Even the extent to which these pages lag as they are annoys me. But also, I actually like the way old guys’ homepages look—the old guys who’ve had the same homepages since the 1990s. They’re horrible, but they’re so fast … and they must have spent so much time on them. I love it. In fact, let’s start a list of them:
These are just some quick ones. I could eventually see this list becoming an “Old Guy Plain HTML Hall of Fame” page. If you want to suggest additions, email me.
What fonts are these? —
For serif, I use a webfont version of Latin Modern, the Computer Modern successor that ships with LaTeX. I converted the official OpenType files into WOFF2 using Google’s woff2-tools package and pulled in the Roman weights and italics. For monospace, I use Source Code Pro. These are my preferred serif and monospace fonts; when I work, Source Code Pro is often on the left side of the screen while Latin Modern (or sometimes old-school Computer Modern) is on the right.
What is this link color scheme? —
Blue navigates away from my homepage, except my own GitHub pages are linked in green; links that stay inside my homepage use a brown.
Why CV so hyperlinked? —
I tried creating a simple LaTeX CV template that I could losslessly convert back and forth between LaTeX and HTML with Pandoc. For some reason this was the requirement I had for making Pandoc such an important feature of my workflow. If I’d succeeded, I might have had both a webpage with the contents of my CV and a PDF download available. But I actually ended up finding the concept a bit redundant – just an excuse to mess around with Pandoc – and anyway, in that case Pandoc would become a bottleneck on the aesthetics of the document. I opted to just go wild with my CV as a PDF.
Where do you host this site? —
This website started out as my GitHub Pages site and still lives there, just under my own domain. The GitHub user site experience is fantastic – it’s a simple matter of using Git – and GitHub Pro is cheaper and faster than most hosting services. People who have homepages often stop maintaining them because the workflow is too disjoint; this way my homepage just lives in another one of my (now private) repositories, and updating it works the same as, e.g., pushing changes to an article I’m writing.