About Sealfur

sealfur.com (this website) is a chance to play around with some HTML and CSS, post some things that interest me and maybe even find a way to engage with others.

About the author

tl;dr

Joshua Kinal is a design engineer with a diverse background: biomedical science, journalism and broadcasting, digital product design and development. His work focuses on how digital products impact the world; from the way they are constructed to the way they are used.

First-person, approachable version

Am I a polymath, or is that considered an arrogant self-declaration?

I have been a designer, writer, journalist, scientist, broadcaster, podcaster and developer.

I worked in television, radio, design studios, universities, print media, start-ups and consultancies.

My previous website was called Little Running Bear and it was built on WordPress^[1]. It’s still there but I stopped writing on it. I say “my previous website”, but like so many web tinkerers, I have little bits of myself all over the web.

sealfur.com exists to move my web-content practice towards having a lot more control over what I produce and how it is rendered in browsers.

Often, before committing an idea onto this site, I’ll fumble around on CodePen. I also use it as a quick way to explain a web-based concept to someone. It’s very handy.

Principles for this site

I believe that principles guide actions and actions reveal principles. The principles I list here are a reminder to me (and maybe a nudge for you). I hope that my actions do not contradict what I call out as important to me.

1. WCAG 2.1 AA+ accessibility
2. Rule of least power (described by Tim Berners-Lee and Noah Mendelsohn)^[2]
3. Function over form
4. Keep learning
5. Low barrier to contribution
6. Build in public

Markdown as default “word processing”

Principle 5 exists to make it as easy as possible for me to add things to this site. I started to find the WYSIWYG interface of WordPress too frustrating for me. In my every day work I write in Markdown if I’m not writing in longhand.

11ty uses markdown-it as its default Markdown parser. So I make use of it to save me some time and help me with some shortcuts like the footnotes you see on this page.

Colophon

This version of the website (Sealfur) was first created in late 2020, and built with Eleventy.

This site is hosted on Netlify which, if I’ve set this up correctly, will automatically build the site when I push changes to my git repository.

Fonts

The display font is Sansita Swashed from Omnibus-Type and the body copy is in Inter by Rasmus Andersson (with many of the fancy features turned on, because I can).