About this site

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This site has only one futile reason for existence:

To prove to myself that it’s possible to do simple web dev tasks using a single small laptop screen running just a terminal (or a bunch of terminals) and terminal/commandline tools

More specifically, I wanted to see if I could use a throw-away hand-me-down laptop as a dev machine for simple web dev work, without it being a complete nightmare.

So here I am, writing a website in Markdown and SASS, using Jekyll to build and locally serve the site, elinks/w3m to preview it, git for source control.

Those parts are all glued together with tmux in a long running session, so if I really wanted to I could ssh in from my main dev machine (with it’s decent keyboard, big-ish screens) and see the same “dev environment” as when I’m crunched up over this plasticy old rattling lump of history.

and you know what…

… it actually bloody well works! Not amazingly mind you. But there’s the jekyll serve pane showing me when I cock up the MD or SASS a small system monitoring pane burbling away to itself, this editing pane - which needs a better editor, and the w3m pane sitting there showing my edits pretty much as I save them.

what isn’t so great

well, there’s the obvious:

• the screen is a cramped 1024x600 thing
• the keyboard is a load of rattling flat scrabble tiles sat on tiny dead molluscs
• I’m using nano as my editor, FFS I want my pretty colours, decent searching, multiple files, …
• I have about a 50/50 hit rate on the ctl-b blah keys for controlling tmux
• w3m doesn’t show the site anything like a modern browser

and a few not so obvious things:

• all the text is the same size and font; since it’s jammed close together it becomes “screen soup” trying to keep straight whether I’m watching the browser, the editor or the build process
• I fat-finger more than I’d expect, and hit keys harder, which does get tiring
• Trying to touch type puts my palms right on the touchpad that sits under the spacebar. This causes all sorts of annoyance.

This is the base Jekyll theme. You can find out more info about customizing your Jekyll theme, as well as basic Jekyll usage documentation at jekyllrb.com

You can find the source code for Jekyll at GitHub: jekyll / jekyll