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Affinity & its residual

Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis

The how and the why of this site.

Affinity & its residual is crafted in the dsl Sinatra with all content stored in CouchDB. I have grown tired of weblog engines and crms that impose their own ways of organizing, storing, and displaying content. Many require a specific database or preprocessor. More stack-agnostic choices still set out their own structure for arranging content or saddle you with one template language or another. Writing your own ’blog software from scratch is one part onerous, one part beaten, well-trodden path. I do not want to solve that problem again. Who would? I want a tool for making this website, not a tool for making websites. Instead of coding an admin interface, I manage this site entirely via a restful API. As CouchDB is schema-free, the internal order of my writing can evolve freely.

The section names are a little bit whimsical because what I write falls into several or all categories. Do not feel limited by where things are placed.

Besides xhtml, all content on this site can be accessed as XML, JSON, or plain text. Just append the appropriate file type to the end of the URL.

Typeset prescriptively by your web browser in Helvetica Neue, a digital variant of Max Miedinger’s original; Consolas, a monospace typeface designed by Lucas de Groot; and Baskerville, a transitional serif.

I adopted methods for browser-leveling and vertical rhythm from Blueprint. Textism and andrewbarnett also inspired me.

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MJA