David Sanson
License
Unless specified otherwise:
- Site design and content licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
One important exception:
- All rights reserved for research papers and drafts of research papers, including all documents linked from my Research page.
Site design
The design of this site is my own. But I began by taking a careful look at Mark Reid’s site, and the bones of this site’s design continue to owe a fair bit to his design.
Nuts and Bolts
This site is generated by
- Jekyll (a lightweight CMS)
Actually, unless you are reading this at http://dsanson.github.com, it was generated using
which has been modified to use pandoc for markdown to html conversion. pandoc-ruby made that easy.
The site makes use of several useful scripts and services:
- Disqus manages comments.
- JQuery makes adding occasional bits of javascript-powered functionality easy
- html5shiv makes older versions of Internet Explorer recognize HTML5 elements.
- H2VX Contacts Conversion Service converts the hcard on the index page to a downloadable vcard.
- Gravatar provides avatars for commenters and the image on my about me page.
- I use the COinS Generator to generate COinS metadata for papers on my research page.
The site is hosted on
an inexpensive pay-as-you-go bare-bones reputable web host. I end up paying ~$9 a year for domain registration and >50¢ a month for storage and bandwidth. I’ve been happy with them so far. To keep that price low, large files (like PDFs) are hosted via
To make the Dropbox URLs look better, I use
A mirror of the site is also available via Github Pages. You can browse the source used by Jekyll to generate the site (and fork it if you like!).
If I were starting over today, I would probably just host the site on Github. The hosting is free, and if you are happy with a url like http://dsanson.github.com that’s that. And they now support custom domains even for free accounts. Then the only cost would be domain registration and DNS. But that is actually a bit of a hassle. The cheapest registrars offer .com addresses for ~$10/year (sometimes half that for the first year). Watch out for hidden privacy fees and sleazy practices. At best, that would save me $5 to $6 a year. But another advantage would be that on Github, I wouldn’t have to worry about additional storage and bandwidth fees.