Acknowledgements

We use a variety of open source libraries and frameworks to further our web development. We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who builds and maintains these tools.

Development Tools

Here, in no particular order, are the tools we use.

Middleman

Middleman is a Ruby tool that builds and generates our website code. It let's us use a variety of tools and languages (Slim, Sass, Compass, YAML, localization, etc.) in development and then automates the construction of our static pages. It has become indispensable.

Slim

Slim is a lightweight templating engine for Ruby. It reduces the amount of syntax to the most basic parts while still being readable. Mostly used to generate HTML it can also process a variety of syntaxes.

Markdown

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool. We use it to write nearly all the content for our site.

SASS

Short for Simply Awesome Style Sheets, SASS (and it's sister, SCSS), greatly speed up the authoring of CSS. Adding variables, equations and other functionality to CSS, SASS is one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal. If you haven't tried it yet we recommend this article on A List Apart: Getting Started with SASS.

Compass

Compass is an open-source CSS framework. It contains a large library of mixins for use with SASS or SCSS that greatly speed up our SASS development.

Bootstrap

We use a heavily modified version of Twitter's Bootstrap toolkit. Initially we were big fans of Blueprint for rapid page development but swiftly changed to Bootstrap when we discovered it.

jQuery

Easily the most ubiquitous JavaScript library available.

Selectivizr

A very handy JavaScript tool that enables a variety of CSS3 pseudo-class and attribute selectors in Internet Explorer.

jQuery.pseudo

We use this in conjunction with selectivizr to enable :before and :after pseudo-selectors as well as the content: attribute.

Pixastic

This is what we use to automagically convert our team photos to black and white. It has a variety of filters, operations and other fancy functions.

Inspiration and Attributions

Our muses and our media sources.

Bearskinrug

Readers of A List Apart are undoubtedly familiar with the illustration prowess of Kevin Cornell. His illustrations have been a great inspiration to us.

Wikimedia Commons

We use a few photos from the Wikimedia Commons library on our About pages.