2026-07-15 08:00:00
A week ago, I had launched this site using QuatroSlab for page titles and Google’s Slabo for body copy. For those that have been around awhile and are familiar with SMACSS, you might recognize QuatroSlab from that site. I like the font and started off with it to see how I’d feel about it on the this new design. Then I chose Slabo as a font that I felt paired well with it.
For the most part, I was fine with it but after finally getting a blog post written and posted under the new design, I was feeling less than thrilled with my choices.
Over yesterday and today, I decided to do some research on fonts and came across Pangram Pangram Foundry. They have some delectable fonts that make me want to do some interesting designs with them. This led me to Fragment. I looked through all the variants and Fragment Text felt just right for the body copy. It felt softer and rounder and more open and friendly than Slabo.
My only complaint is that I want some of the discretionary ligatures in the list of standard ligatures like the Th and ft. The rest of them are too much flourish for body copy. I enabled the ligatures for headings, at least, where some flourish is warranted.
For page headings, though, I wanted something bolder. This is where Pangram Pangram’s Pangaia comes in. I like the slightly retro-modern funky feel that this font brings to the table.
From a technical perspective, this is the first time I’ve taken advantage of OpenType feature capabilities and I found it confusing as I couldn’t find a good explanation of what liga or dlig or ss03 mean or how to know whether a font even supports these.
I’ve learned that you can turn these on or off via CSS’s font-feature-settings property.
font-feature-settings: "ss02", "ss03", "ss04", "dlig", "zero", "onum";
Declaring the value turns them on. You can alternatively, specifically declare them on or off using the words on or off or the numbers 1 or 0. The following would enable features ss02, ss03, zero, and onum; it would disable ss04 and dlig.
font-feature-settings: "ss02" on, "ss03" 1, "ss04" off, "dlig" 0, "zero", "onum";
The question then became about how to figure out which of these features exist in a particular font. For this, I used FontDrop!. It will show you what features are available and what those features look like for that font. FontDrop! is all client-side, too, which is nice. I didn’t want to be uploading files that aren’t mine to someone’s server.
I suspect I will end up tweaking which of these features are on or off as I add more content to the site and decide what works well for a given scenario.
2026-07-12 08:00:00
Welcome to the beginning. The end happened months ago but like many endings, sometimes they take awhile.
Snook.ca has, for the better part of the last 25 years, been mostly a professional outlet for me. What started out as “Technical Articles” turned into “a collection of tips, tricks, and bookmarks on web development” to just “Tips, Tricks, and Bookmarks on Web Development.” Stepping away from full time web design and development, I found myself writing more personal posts and changed the tagline to “Life and Times of a Web Developer” about a year ago or so to reflect that change.
On top of that, the design for the site had only changed marginally over the last 17 years. It was time for something new. I initially had some grand plans to push the limits of CSS or use some bleeding edge features as a way of stretching my dev skills that had gone somewhat dormant since the start of the pandemic. Instead, as I played with the design, I became more enamoured with simplicity—a better reflection of my personal life. (Ultimately, I also knew that if I made it too complex, I’d create roadblocks to wanting to work on the site.)
To start something fresh and new, I thought it best to put a bow on the old stuff and tuck it away. All of those old posts were and are aptly named Archives. It’s similar to how Jason Santa Maria or Rob Weychert have their site versioning: the content and design are set in stone. Everything as of April 2026 was converted into static pages, no longer powered by CakePHP.
The time between April and now has been spent cleaning up a bunch of the cruft that had built up over the years. It also included working on a new site design that I’d be happy enough to launch with and then continue to iterate on after it has gone live.
That’s technically where we are now. This is the inaugural post of the new site. If you’re reading this via RSS, that means the redirects are working. The journal is now called Everything and Nothing. It might be self evident but it’s because the journal is about everything and nothing. There are no categories like there were before. (Although I had all but removed the categories from the previous version. The URL was the only tell left.)
The design is a continued evolution of what came before. The “bookmark” in the header is now in tatters. The paper background and pencil lines are gone, leaving just a solid colour. The wavy lines are gone. The simple palette is still the same colours as before: the cream, the grey, and the green haven’t changed. I was able to finally get a dark mode added to the site, which is just the cream and the grey swapped. There's that simplicity again.
I also played with scroll-based animations using view-timeline. If you’re in Firefox, you can enable them in your settings. If not, the site works fine either way. Chrome and Safari support them. There’s some grid, @support, clamp and custom properties. Nothing ground breaking.
I decided not to have a main navigation. Mostly because it’s not necessary. Simplicity, yet again. My theory is that anybody who gets dropped into the middle of the site will go to the home page, if they go anywhere else at all.
Under the hood, I’m now using 11ty. I’ve used it for a few other projects and I like its approach. I’m familiar with it and I knew it would do what I needed it to do for this.
This design is an evolution and it will continue to evolve. This just marks the beginning. Or is it the end it’s marking? Or is it neither since this is just an evolution? Like a moth turning into a butterfly? gags How cliché.
Whatever it is, the site marches on. For those of you who consume via RSS and never click through, you’ll not see any different. The post frequency will continue to ebb and flow.
I’ve thought about consolidating things like the Photos and whisky reviews into the main site, allowing an easier way to weave all the pieces together, playing with themes built off the base design. That might happen.
Similar to the previous design that slowly changed over the years, this design, too, will slowly change as I add and remove and shift elements. This site is my playground, after all. As others have described their own sites, it’s my worry stone, my prayer beads. It provides me a place to practice my craft of design, development, and writing.
Importantly, it continues to provide a space outside of the algorithm, for myself and for others.
