About

I shoot photos for a hobby. My flickr page is where you will find most of my photos. Protozoic.com is a website I’ve run with my brother for years. Some videos and other random things can be found there. I can be reached at tgray at this domain.

Site details

This site is written in HTML5. It’s been tested in Safari (including iPhone), Firefox, Chrome, and elinks. It should render nicely in any browser capable of rendering HTML5. It should also degrade nicely in other browsers, though some of the styling may be harmed.

The website uses hugo to generate static HTML files for serving. Search results are provided by a bit of javascript and Xapian/Omega.

I trialed both Google AJAX Search API, Xapian/Omega, and swish-e. Back in the day, the swish-e solution worked the best for me. The Google search didn’t index the many pdfs on this site fully, and Xapian/Omega has poor spidering capabilities. A few years later, swish-e gave up the ghost and I moved back to a combination of Xapian/Omega for the hardcore search, and just a link to Google for the lightweight stuff. In the most recent version of the site, I’m relying fulling on Xapian/Omega for all search. I also fixed the Xapian/Omega search results to use AJAX for a nicer user experience. I was very close to skipping that and just have an old school search interface, but the AJAX experience is a bit nicer.

Originally, this site was served from static pages that were generated with a custom script written in Python (pyopyo). The only major functionality it was missing was dealing with blog-like posts sensibly. Then I moved to Octopress for a few weeks before settling on nanoc for several years. nanoc is a nice system and very flexible, which attracted me to it. I’ve been wanting to move to hugo for several years, but at the time, it didn’t have the flexibility I required, or I couldn’t figure out how to wrangle it to do what I wanted. It’s matured enough now that I got it working.