About Me

My name is Tom Dillon. When I’m not working I write stories, ride my bike a lot, read books, climb rocks, and play (too many) board games. I have an amazing family and we live with a bunch of cats. Generally I want to spend less time noodling on my phone and more time writing and making things.

To avoid spambots, I’m not going to post my email address here. Eventually I’m going to figure out a better way, but in the meantime you can probably guess that I have an email address that consists of my first name at this domain.

Me, but elsewhere

I don’t really have much of a presence on traditional social media, since it is generally pretty toxic, but you can find me elsewhere on the internet:

• If you want to see (most of) the articles that I’m reading, you can see them (and occasionally what I thought of them) on my blurblog. If you need an RSS reader, I’ve been pretty happy with newsblur ever since Google killed Reader. Keep in mind that a lot of the stuff I share there will eventually end up in an “Inside Tom’s Head” post.
• If you want to see what I’m listening to, you can follow me on Apple Music. My user name there is @tom_dillon.
• I log all of my board game plays on BoardGameGeek and you can see my (out of date) profile there, too.

About This Site

Design

This site has gone through many different iterations, but this is the first one in a long time that the design hasn’t been dictated by available Wordrpress themes. Instead, when I first stumbled upon Tom MacWright’s site, I was really impressed with the simplicity of it. So I stole it. Well, most of it. Maybe copied is the right word here. What I’m trying to say is, don’t sue me.

Aside from MacWright’s site, here’s some of the stuff I found helpful:

• Jekyll Documentation
• Lots of sites about how to get my new Pixelbook Go set up for development.
• The thorough grid and flexbox guides on css-tricks.com
• This helpful guide of how to set up previous/next links in blog posts. I did end up making some changes to it, such as switching over to a CSS flexbox and adding else clauses for the first and last posts.
• Tania Rascia’s An Overview of CSS: An Art, A Science, A Nightmare

Platform

This site runs on Jekyll. After more than a decade on Wordpress, I learned about Static Site Generators (SSGs). Although I like the fancy interface of Wordpress, ultimately it was overkill for my (infrequently updated) blog. Although Jekyll had a bit of learning curve, I found the simplicity of it to be alluring, and like how snappy SSGs are (since everything is pre-rendered).