Matt's Website: About

One of favorite things on the internet are blogs kept by people who share articles, books, music, movies, shows and other things they like. Usually those things come with a little explanation of why a certain piece of content had an impact on them.

For me it’s a healthier way of finding good media to consume. The more thoughtful blogs I find the less time I spend on social media, news sites, and link aggregators. This has been really good for my mental health.

One day I realized if I really like it when my friends keep this style blog, maybe I should too! I’m hoping I’ll stick with this blog more consistently and long-term by not committing to writing perfect, long, high-quality content.

I’m sure I’ll post longer things occasionally, but only as the spirit moves me.

If for some reason you’d like to contact me just email hello at mattbaker.contact.

Colophon

I wish more people with blogs talked about how they make them. As I was considering making my own I found myself curious how others were doing it. What follows are some notes on how I make and publish this blog.

Typesetting

The body font is Mulish and the secondary font is ET Book.

I spent a lot of time getting the vertical rhythm right. It’s rare I do frontend work these days, and I’m not designer, but it’s that “one weird trick!” anyone can do with a little effort and it makes a huge difference.

The Baseliner extension is a nice tool to help you check if your grid is working correctly, especially combined with the way Firefox’s devtools highlights elements on the page.

Writing

I use Typora to compose in markdown. It’s a really nice little editor.

Typora can be themed so I created a custom theme using this site’s CSS, so I get a sort of WYSIWYG text editor with not much effort.

Building and Publishing

I’ve tried a lot of static side generators and never found one I liked, they all seem to “box you in” to a really specific way of doing things.

So I built a small one for myself in Elixir. It copies one directory to a new “release” directory, transforming any files along the way (like .eex, .markdown). Files it doesn’t know how to transform are copied untouched (CSS).

The site is hosted with Cloudflare Pages, it has a generous free-tier. I actually love self-hosting things and have a “homelab” server running, but there’s something to be said for not having to punch a hole in your home network’s firewall.

I use Buttondown to handle sending the newsletter, it’s a nice product built and run by a single developer and I love supporting independent businesses. Buttondown also gives you an RSS feed of your newsletters for free, although I ended up creating my own in the end.

If you want to subscribe to this site in newsletter form head over here.