Minor blog changes
My blog has been quiet for a while but during the last few days I've made some changes. Most importantly I have slightly improved my workflow. I created a small script for Geany to convert the Markdown files to HTML and display them in the browser at the press of a button. That however was still not satisfactory. A look into the repositories revealed ReText as a dedicated Markdown (and ReStructuredText) editor. I believe to have tried it last year, but AFAIR back then it just crashed and was unusable. This time around it seems to work relatively well. I can get a live preview, even with CSS applied. No crashes so far, but the optional Webkit renderer seems to have problems with some fonts.
Easier pushing
Previously I let Luapress build the site into a directory called public_html and simply copied that to the server as web root. That however had a problem: sometimes it was necessary or convenient to replace the entire directory on the server. Because it was the web root, it also needed to include files not managed by Luapress, for example the .htaccess file. I needed save and restore those files. Instead, with minimal changes, I now build everything to a directory called 'murks' and copy that into the web root. Everything in there can be replaced easily, .htaccess and friends can stay where they are. The only downside is an even uglier URL, at least until I manage to write a proper rewrite rule to take care of that. I also switched from scp to rsync, which will avoid unnecessary transfers. Not that it matters much with this tiny page.
Web fonts
I finally decided to introduce web fonts. The main font I use is Bitstream Charter. I had the font installed but for some reasons I did not look into very much it wasn't rendered properly. I had another look at web fonts and how to include them properly. If you have "Bitstream Charter" or just "Charter" installed locally, then your browser will use that, otherwise it will load it from my page. I provide the font as either WOFF2 or WOFF. In my case the WOFF2 version is smaller by almost a third compared to WOFF and about half the size of the TTF version. Most modern browsers support WOFF2. It is a bit ironic but not at all unexpected that almost no mobile browser supports WOFF2 yet. I have not yet figured out how to include the font license in the WOFF2 file. The reference encoder by Google certainly can't do it. For completeness's sake you can find the Bitstream Charter license here (removed since I no longer use this font, 2020-12-06).