Site
This website was made with love by John Feminella. Extensive and thoughtful work and advice was also contributed by the redoubtable John Otander. Each bit was artisanally regurgitated onto the screen for your express delight.
Tools
The site comprises an entirely static build pipeline. Individual files are written in a combination of Markdown (created by John Gruber), with occasional inline (created by Leslie Lamport). Templates are in HTML using the Liquid templating language.
The final content is then rendered into HTML via Jekyll in a Rake pipeline. The is rendered by MathJax, using JavaScript. No dynamic content is served or stored, so HTTP-level caching with Varnish is very easy since files don’t change much. Laziness is a virtue!
Type
The fonts are PT Sans from ParaType, and Slabo 27px from John Hudson at Tiro Typeworks.
Name
The name of the blog, Open Brackets, reflects the appeal that the blank slate of software development holds for me. What follows a single { may be the most trivial beginner’s program, or the most important piece of code ever written. And when we write the closing }, it is worth reflecting on whether what we wrote adds value to the world. Does it make you a happier person for having written it?
Source code
The GitHub repository for the deployed version of the site is available here. The original source code is here.