Hey there!
About the Author
My name is James Williamson. I’m a Senior Author at lynda.com and I’ve been writing and teaching web design and development for just over 15 years or so. I love what I do and hope you find this blog useful. If you see me out at a conference or event please say hello. My favorite form of communication is Twitter, where you’ll find me ranting 140 characters at a time at @jameswillweb. I’ve been blessed to work in an industry that I love and want to thank all of you for your support over the years.
I live in a small town in South Carolina just south of Charlotte, where my wonderful wife Holly and I are currently raising three amazing daughters.
About this Blog
A version of this blog was originally created as a part of the lynda.com course Jekyll for Web Designers. When I decided to reactivate my long dormant personal blog I decided to adapt the one I had created for the course. In the business we call that “eating your own dog food.” It’s a terrible phrase and have no idea why we use it. Currently I build the blog using Jekyll and host it using Github pages, although I’m considering a move to AWS.
If you like it, feel free to download it from my Github repository and use it as you see fit. Just don’t charge for it, obviously. I designed the blog as a teaching tool first and foremost, but it is designed to be simple, clean, accessible, and responsive. I used HTML5 Boilerplate and Normalize.css as my starting points and narrowed them down to what I considered to be the essentials. The HTML focuses on semantics and is built with accessibility in mind. The CSS is not based on any framework, and only contains what the blog needs, there are no layout grids or extra UI classes. I don’t use SASS, but Jekyll processes SASS automatically, so it’s a snap to add it if you’d like. The entire blog was built to be customized as you wish, and not force you into any conventions or frameworks. The only outside dependencies are two fonts that I am loading from the Google Fonts API. I use the Web Font Loading script to assist loading the fonts, but I don’t do anything fancy like asynchronous loading mainly just to tick off Zach Leatherman.