This goes back to Open Sans, which is what I was using previously.
I really like Source Sans Pro. Unfortunately, the font rendered far too
small relative to other sans-serif fonts, which caused an unpleasent
experience for both slow page loads (e.g. over Tor or slower
connections) and for users with web fonts disabled (e.g. via NoScript).
Further, the font is huge: the WOFF is over 100KiB per font, and I was
using regular and light versions. Open Sans, in contrast, is <20KiB per
font, allowing me to use Regular, Light, and SemiBold and still be about
half the size of the single Source Sans Pro Regular.
As a bonus, users may also already have Open Sans installed on their
system.
I settled with WOFF instead of WOFF2 for browser support.
The site now looks pretty close on fallback, which is good. For
example, I use DejaVu Sans as my default font, and it even has a Light
version that renders correctly.
As with all resources on my site, I host this from my own domain rather
than via Google's servers. That means that the font won't be cached for
users when they first visit the site, but that's okay---privacy is more
important.
I should note that, since I use NoScript, I almost never load web fonts
for other sites. But I still wanted to try to provide a consistent look
across systems for those who do wish to load fonts.
I didn't originally intend for all of this to be in a single commit. But
here we are. I don't have the time to split these up more cleanly; this
project is taking more time than I originally hoped that it would.
This is a new static site generator. More information to follow in the
near future (hopefully in the form of an article), but repo2html is now
removed. See code comments for additional information; I tried to make it
suitable as a learning resource for others. It is essentially a set of
shell scripts with a fairly robust build for incremental generation.
The site has changed drastically, reflecting that its purpose has changed
over the years: it is now intended for publishing quality works (or at least
I hope), not just a braindump.
This retains most of the text of the original pages verbatim, with the
exception of the About page. Other pages may have their text modified in
commits that follow.
Enhancements to follow in future commits.
Mike Gerwitz