About this site

This site is written and produced by Carl Fooks.

Shot in very low light in a jungle in Thailand.

The name Metta-Programming is a playful combination of the computer programming technique and the Pali word Mettā, or loving-kindness, and is my attempt at best summing up the thrust of my life in two words!

Attributions

The Ensō (Japanese for “circle”) is based on the Wikimedia version, produced by “Zenwhat”, which is in itself derived from another image of the calligraphy of Kanjuro Shibata XX. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license. Please refer to the linked pages for more details.

The design of this site borrows a lot from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I’m a big fan of his writing and his site - I just love the simplicity of it - so it’s probably no surprise that so much of it is borrowed from here.

I’ve used Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset stylesheet to give myself a nice starting point. Fighting browser inconsistencies is probably the most irritating part of developing for the web and this goes a long way towards negating that.

How it’s made

Articles are generated using Jekyll with a few minor customisations. I’m using kramdown for the Markdown implementation because of it’s speed and features (including nice footnote handling and smart punctuation, although it’s not SmartyPants).

Syntax highlighting is done using Pygments which I prefer over CodeRay.

The site is currently hosted on a Debian GNU/Linux box, running Apache.

Desktop Software

Image editing is done using Acorn, the image editor for humans – which was what I typed before I realised it was its marketing tagline. Everything else is done using TextMate, which when you’re flying, has got to be about the most productive text editor ever!

Warning

This site makes simple use of HTML5. As such, it’s better suited to modern, standards compliant browsers.

If you find you’re having problems, and it’s possible, please consider upgrading.