With this post, I intend to leave a trace of the specs of this blog. I started this project in 2008 and never publicly mentioned it.
Codename is Ichigo, named after Kurosaki Ichigo, the main character of the manga series Bleach by Tite Kubo. There’s no particular reason for the reference—I just like the manga.
Since then, the blog has been a playground to experiment with technologies, including Entity Framework, Dynamic Data, URL Routing, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, @font-face, and OAuth.
Server-side
- ASP.NET Web Forms — master pages, user controls, forms authentication
- .NET Framework 3.5 — codebase, Entity Framework
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure App Service (Web Apps)
Client-side
- HTML5 — valid per W3C at the time of writing
- CSS3 — validated by W3C
- jQuery
- highlight.js
- RSS — custom
- Sitemap — custom
- Taxonomy — custom
- Rich text editor — CKEditor
Right now the engine isn’t meant to be open or offered as a service—I’m not sure I would have the perseverance to maintain it, nor can I think of anybody interested in building on it.
I like it the way it is: lightweight, minimal, modern, readable, distraction‑free. The logo/favicon is something I made from a cup‑of‑coffee picture with Inkscape, because for many developers, coffee is a constant.
The theme is custom, written line by line. I just can’t find another blog theme that I like as much. The font is DejaVu Serif. The DejaVu family in the sans‑serif variant is the font I use on all my Windows workstations.
I still think I’ll end up migrating to WordPress or Ghost, which was (at the time of writing) the latest hype—and for good reasons—but I made no serious commitment to blogging, so it’s still nice to have my very own place.