About This Site

Melded Thought is written and produced by Rob Mecham. Various ideas for the design, content and server software for this website have been proudly stolen¹ from John Gruber, James Bennett, Alex Payne, Sean Sperte and others. As you might expect, this site is an outlet for my thoughts which I deem of possible interest to others. It serves also as a test bed for ideas I have about web design and blogs.

This website will likely only render correctly in the latest versions of standards-compliant browsers such as FireFox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome 2. The site will look slightly better on a Mac as various headings make use of either the classic Hoefler Text font or the modernist Helvetica font, both of which are non-free fonts pre-loaded on all Macs. I’ve also taken advantage of the splendid open-source font DejaVu Sans Mono not only as my monospace font but also as my go-to font for Unicode characters that may not be supported in other fonts. Since the DejaVu fonts are free, I’ve embedded DejaVu Sans Mono using the @font-face directive.

The Software That Drives Melded Thought

Melded Thought is driven by custom software of my own making written in Python and using the excellent Django framework. I started with James Bennett’s Coltrane app but there is little left of that at this point.² I’ve also made liberal use of Mr. Bennett’s Typogrify, Mr. Bennett’s Template Utils, a Python port of Mr. Gruber’s TitleCase, a Python port of Mr. Gruber’s SmartyPants and a Python port of Mr. Gruber’s Markdown. Syntax highlighting in code snippets is courtesy of Pygments. The server runs Ubuntu Linux and MySQL.

On the desktop side of things, my preferred operating system is Mac OS X. My text editor of choice is the incomparable TextMate. I hand-craft my own HTML but I must admit to cheating with CSS by using the very handy CSSEdit from MacRabbit. I browse and test mainly with FireFox and its superb plug-in, Firebug. Sequel Pro helps me to manage my databases.

Web Standards

Currently, this website conforms to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional specification. As you may have heard, however, XHTML2 is now dead and HTML5 is the future of the web. As the work of defining HTML5 nears completion and as time permits, I will be transitioning this site to HTML5. Of course, the web is constantly evolving and I will do my best to keep this site updated with the latest standards. As stated above, this site will almost certainly not render correctly in non-standards-compliant browsers. This site is also made possible through the use of valid CSS3 and valid Atom feeds.

FAQ

Q: Why doesn’t your website look quite right in Internet Explorer?
A: To (very poorly) paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the website but in your browser. Internet Explorer is evil and you should never use it. Ever. IE breaks the web. Seriously. Please, for the sake of everyone else who uses the Internet, stop using it. Now.

Q: What’s the big deal about Helvetica? Isn’t Arial just the same?
A: No, they aren’t the same. Helvetica is a real font; Arial is an ugly knock-off.

Q: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?
A: African or European?

Q: Um, where are the comments?
A: I won’t go quite so far as to say that comments are evil but when it comes to comments especially, “[t]he anonymity of the Internet inspires hit-and-run attacks, unintelligible ramblings, and truckloads of spam.” I’ve foregone comments primarily to avoid those things. Which is not to say that I do not welcome debate; quite the opposite is true. John Gruber and Alex Payne, among others, have found that eschewing comments can actually augment the caliber of debate in an Internet setting. “It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own readers. It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.”