I’ve made 2015 about raising money for Macmillan by doing triathlons and more, and would love for you to find out why!

About this site

There’s a lot of magic behind robsterlini.co.uk…

Gorgeous assets

Type

All of the type is set in Skolar, from the amazing, award-winning Rosetta type foundry.

Thoughout my site’s life, I’ve hosted Skolar on Typekit, Fontdeck; but as part of the static site move I converted it all over to self-hosting. I was massively lucky that David Březina – the man behind Skolar – reached out and helped me subset the exact glyphs I need. We reduced the size of the fonts being served down from 750kb+ to ~150kb, whilst maintaining the opentype features that I wanted to serve!

Iconography

I’d love to claim the icons as my own, but they’re by the ever-talented Jory Raphael. You can check out the growing icon collection at symbolicons.com.

Photography

The majority of photos on this site have been taken (somewhat haphazardly) by myself, with a few exceptions:

  • My headshot was taken by Rameet – Fueled’s amazing CEO;
  • All of the gifs on the error pages (404 & 403 are taken from the glorious world-wide web.

The technologies

The build

The site is built with Middleman – a static site generator written in Ruby. Moving to a static site was a big jump, but with my site having a small footprint and the customisation available, it was a no-brainer.

It uses the Fueled Boilerplate as a foundation, which harnesses the power of Sass, smashes down all the JS into one file, and compiling everything down on the fly to speed up my local development.

Hosting

MediaTemple are the awesome guys and gals who host my site, and provide my sterlini.co and robsterlini.com domains. 123-reg are the (horrible) gremlins behind my .co.uk domain, but they’re real bastards so I won’t link to them.

Repo

All of the code for this site is available on Github.

Thanks

Lots of people have helped me out throughout my site, whether that be through development, testing, or just being supportive of what I do cough mum and dad cough. Here are just a few:

  • The University of Reading Typo lecturers for helping me realise just how important considered typography is.
  • Marc Thomas (and the Fueled team), for putting up with my endless Ruby questions, and helping me push my limits in my role at Fueled that made this site possible;
  • David Březina for putting in so much extra legwork to help serve Skolar in all its glory with the smallest font-size possible!

There are definitely more people that need thanking, and this list will grow as I remember them. I promise!

The small print

Be inspired, but don’t steal

I’m all for the open web, and all that, but you have to be respectful about it. If there’s a particular aspect of my site that you like, by all means use it as inspiration and work it into your design, but please don’t just outright burgle huge chunks of it. I can’t stop you, but you don’t learn anything by copying code like for like.

That said, if there are any particlar bits that you love and want to know how (or why) I’ve implemented them in that way then don’t hesitate to ask.

Cookies

I use a select few cookies on my site, the majority of which are to provide analytics so I can improve my site for the people who are actually accessing it. By all means block the cookies, but if you haven’t then thanks for being awesome!