I haven’t had time to write anything this week, despite having two half-started entries to work from. I promised myself I wouldn’t let a week go by without writing something, but here I am. So I thought I’d throw together something about how I found a nice looking blog, and what that has me thinking about my own blog.

I was going to apologize for this being a short, “I have to write something” post, but it isn’t turning out to be that short. That’s because the journey to the blog I liked so much is a bit of a story in itself. It starts with a new programming language, moves on to touch on emoji support in Emacs, and only then ends up at the blog that caught my eye.

I am still using GNU Emacs as my editor of choice. I’m constantly talking about switching to something more modern (e.g. Atom), but I’ve been using Emacs for a long time now. My fingers know the mystical key combinations way too well, and there are a lot of other things about how it works that I am not sure I can give up after all these years.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the Rust programming language. I’d had it on a list of languages to look at for a few months, then a post on Hacker Noon¹ called Why I am Learning Rust Now made me take another look.

I am still just scratching the surface, working through the book The Rust Programming Language, which is online, and has a lot of examples of code to try. At some point, I want to find an interesting, but not too large project to write in Rust. Then I’ll know what I really think.

Now Rust strings are specified to be UTF-8, and, perhaps to emphasize that, the book seems to like inserting emojis into the strings in its sample programs. So, for example, I just ran across this:

let x = '💅';

cute, right?

Now I’m putting a lot of this code into my little sample Rust programs which I edit, naturally, in Emacs. I was able to cut and paste the character above (which I’ve just learned is called the “Nail Polish” emoji²) into my program, but I wondered, what if I had wanted to enter a string including it “from scratch”. How would I do that? The Mac way is to bring up the Character Viewer using Ctrl-Command-Space, but that doesn’t work in Emacs. I could, of course, enter it using hex Unicode, but ewww. No, I want a way to just type, say, :nailpolish: and get the character I want.

I did some searching, and didn’t really find what I was looking for. What I did find was a blog post by someone named Sebastian Wiesner entitled Bye Bye Emojis: Emacs Hates MacOS I am using Emacs 24.5.1. Evidently, in Emacs 25.1 trying to paste that nail polish emoji wouldn’t have worked. They took the support for multicolor font display out of Emacs essentially because it didn’t work in versions of Emacs for free operating systems. Well that’s pretty silly, and I guess I won’t be upgrading to 25.1 anytime soon.

But now I come to the real point of all of this. After reading about the Emacs Emoji silliness, I found myself admiring the design of Wiesner’s blog. It was actually kind of gorgeous. It is very simple, and I was pretty sure it was made of static web pages, just like my blog. (Except for the Disqus comments, just like my blog.)

As I frequently do, I looked at the page source. It was pretty clean as well. Poking around a bit more, there was very little there! Some fonts, a very small CSS file, only enough JavaScript for Google Analytics and Disqus. His About page says

The site is built for GitHub Pages, with standard Jekyll, the default Minima theme and a careful amount of custom styling, using the Vollkorn font for body text, and Source Code Pro for monospace text and code samples.

Nice. I don’t know how much of the CSS came from the theme, and how much Mr. Wiesner wrote but it does a very nice job and is absolutely tiny compared to the mass of Bootstrap code (CSS and JavaScript) I download for this blog! I’m pretty sure the Vollkorn font is one of the things that made the site so attractive as well. It is amazing what a difference choosing a good font makes. (I imagine I could just steal the font and be much happier with this blog.)

I don’t think there I need to switch the whole blog over to Jekyll, although I am intrigued. I’ve been thinking about using something lighter than Bootstrap. I went out of my way to use Bootstrap for this blog because I had just learned it, and wanted to use it for something, but the truth is, unless I mess with the theme, I never even know it is there.

So hopefully, I’ll be exploring all of this sometime soon. And there’s my, “I don’t have time for anything but a quick filler post.” Whoa, where did the last two hours go?! 😏³