Colophon

benmyers.dev is built with the Eleventy static site generator by Zach Leatherman. I’m currently running Eleventy v3.1.2.

This site is hosted on Netlify.

Many, if not most, of the design tokens in the current iteration of this site were borrowed from Open Props by Adam Argyle.

The fonts used are:

• Nexa as the brand/heading font
• Inter for the body font
• The monospace font stack is adapted from Modern Font Stacks

The swirling pattern used in hero banners throughout the site comes from Hero Patterns.

Icons used throughout the site come from the many contributors to The Noun Project.

Syntax highlighting for code snippets is provided by Prism, adapted for static site generation by following this article from Aleksandr Hovhannisyan.

The profile picture on the homepage and throughout my social media accounts was taken by my friend Shepherd at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX. The art behind me is City (or Stadt in the original German), by Otto Müller.

For more information, read my accessibility statement.

Automated accessibility testing is performed with axe DevTools. The experience is validated within the VoiceOver, JAWS, and NVDA screenreaders. Forced-colors testing is performed with contrast themes on Windows.

Inspired by the styleguide in Robin Sloan’s colophon.

The following are some of my preferences (really, idiosyncracies) that I try to follow when writing.

• Post titles and headings should be titlecased. Breaking from convention, though, short words may be capitalized if it’d look weird that they’re the only uncapitalized words in the phrase.
• When using proper names, always defer to what someone or something wishes to be called, be they people or trademarks, when it comes to spelling, capitalization, name order, and so forth. npm, not NPM, for instance. Node.js, not NodeJS.
• Avoid abbreviations, especially acronyms. Abbreviations are often more for the writer’s benefit than for the reader’s, and using expanded forms means readers don’t need to pause and think back on what the abbreviation means.
  • Some abbreviations are clearly better known than the full name, like HTML or CSS. These are exceptions to the rule.
  • Introduce an abbreviation only if it seems likely that readers could encounter that abbreviation elsewhere, but then continue to use the expanded form.
  • When a proper name uses abbreviations, that’s still their name, and precedence should go towards observing that, rather than avoiding the abbreviation. This goes for every site, product, event, or other trademark that uses a11y, such as A11yTO, The A11Y Project, or pa11y.
• Prefer unhyphenated compound words. For instance, prebuilt, rerendering, sitemap, webring.
  • Weird idiosyncracy here: for some reason, I insist on server-side, but I’m happy to use either client-side or clientside.
• I like the fancy accents. I will always prefer résumé over resume.
• In more instructional articles, prefer the collaborative we over a more accusatory you. Especially since “we” don’t know what the reader’s experience level or familiarity is.
• Prefer practical examples over contrived examples. Avoid meaningless variable names like foo, or examples that people likely wouldn’t ever do in real life, in favor of simple examples that replicate things readers have likely seen before. That said, examples shouldn’t require wading through a bunch of cruft to get to the heart of what I’m trying to communicate.

This site is a part of the a11y-webring.club, a webring of digital accessibility practitioners and advocates, built by Eric Bailey. Check out the previous site in the ring, the next site in the ring, a random site in the ring, or how you can join the ring.