This site is written, built (so to speak) and maintained by Kevin Purdy. Here are the open-source pieces and smart people that helped with everything but the text.
The core pieces come from Jekyll, a static site generation tool that lures in Markdown nerds like me who know just enough to be really annoying to people who know more. I have the pleasure of being a friend and coworker of one of Jekyll’s major contributors, Nick Quaranto. He answered some questions and sparked the move.
The archive of posts from before November 2013 come from a WordPress-based site on a shared host. I used exitwp to convert most of those posts to Jekyll-ready Markdown.
Most of the content was written in gedit on an Ubuntu machine, though I used Draft or Prose.io for some longer pieces. The images were smashed down to reasonable size by Trimage. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which hosts Jekyll and simple HTML sites for free, which is amazing.
The layout, such as it is, come from picking apart and copying other sites, like most things on the web. Most helpful were a responsive Jekyll template from Kashyap/kgrz and the smart defaults of Jekyll itself.
Designer Nicholas Barone gave far too much free advice and guidance on both goals and details. David Kleinshmidt weighed in on font weights and typography decisions. Chris Van Patten dispensed advice on spacing and differentiation. Paddy Foran implemented RSS and pushed SubToMe as a subscribe tool. Buffalo has smart people in some of its chairs.
The typography is augmented by and adapted from Zachary Kain and Dennis Gaebel’s TypePlate starter kit. The fonts are Merriweather and Oswald. A few other typefaces may sneak into blockquotes and code snippets here and there.
The colors come from the Penguin cover of Shane Jones’ Light Boxes (more specifically, a wallpaper from the Italian edition).
Everything else came from asking my wife if something looked terrible. Thank you, Liz.