Of Jekyll and Hyde
For the last two years or so I've been using SquareSpace as my host and CMS. Hands down, they have the best customer support and SquareSpace 6 is an amazing platform for both easy site setup and their new developers stack is really well thought-out. My one issue is they choose LESS, and while a fine pre-processor, I've chosen SASS/Compass and don't plan on changing any time soon. So for my site redesign I've decided to move from Squarespace to GitHub Pages. I have to say it's really refreshing to completely build a site from scratch again, as opposed to working with a more structured CMS. For this design my toolkit is HTML5 Boilerplate, inuit.css library and I invited Compass to the party to provide some additional CSS3 mixins. I picked inuit.css because I've been an OOCSS proponent for quite a while and @csswizardry has built a great library that does it's best to not influence your design choices like other library/frameworks and IMO delivers on that promise. I picked HTML5 Boilerplate as my HTML starting point for many reasons, most of which I detail in this earlier post. In adding Compass to the stack I've modified a few of the inuit.css mixins to use the helpers and function builtin to Compass. The most interesting thing I'm attempting in this build is to use just <nav> and a elements for all navigation blocks. So my main nav looks like this:
<nav class="nav site-nav">
<a class="site-nav__blog" href="/">blog</a>
<a class="site-nav__about" href="/about/">about</a>
<a class="site-nav__projects" href="/projects/">projects</a>
</nav>
To get this to work I've rewritten the nav and pagination classes of Inuit to require <nav> instead of the <ol> or <ul> elements. My next task is wire up a deeper navigation structure. Credit for this idea goes to @bphogan for his tweet, thinking out loud if it could reasonably be done.
My fork of inuit.css can be found here h3r2on/inuit.css.
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