About
Welcome to my little corner of the internet! I’m Pete and this is my website, which is dedicated to everything related to software development and technology in general. I’m an embedded software engineer by profession and this is where I will be writing about topics that I am currently learning or have experience with that I wish to share.
If you have read any of my articles and have specific questions or request, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Website
This website is powered by the WordPress blogging software and is hosted by the excellent WebFaction (affiliate link — sign up through that and I get some money back). In addition to the basic WordPress install, I rely on a number of plugins:
- CodeColorer provides the syntax highlighting.
- Markdown for WordPress and bbPress provides easier editing based on Michel Fortin’s Markdown Extra, which is in turn based on John Gruber’s Markdown.
- Math Comment Spam Protection is to blame for having to do some addition before you can post a comment.
- Organize Series provides the linked series articles.
- WP-HTML-Compression and WP Minify are the reason the pages load quickly and the page source is hopelessly unreadable.
- WP Super Cache keeps the site speedy under load (should there ever be any).
- wp-Typography gives me smart quotes, em-dashes and many other nice typography-related touches.
Theme
The theme used for this site is originally based on Cleanr from WPshoppe. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that — I started from a modified version by Matt Gemmell and went on to alter several aspects of the design.
I have changed the fonts, slightly tweaked the layout and added some new elements (such as blockquotes and source-code areas). I will be releasing the modified theme eventually, but right now I am still tweaking things on a regular basis. If you can’t wait, please contact me and I will send you a copy.
Software
This site couldn’t exist without some really great software for Mac OS X:
- OmniGraffle provides most of the diagrams, icons and graphics. This one alone is reason to switch to a Mac.
- Pixelmator has been used to touch up most of the photos and images.
- Transmit is my SFTP client of choice; it uploads all the media content to the site.
- TextMate makes text editing fast and painless — very useful for theme editing.