Site Credits

Back in 2005 I decided to create this page to hold all the credits due to the various components and inspirations for the site. Over the years quite a lot has changed, but I try to keep it updated.

What You See

  • The current design is based on Lanyon, which I am quite happy with.
  • The web thumbnails that grace the linkblog entries are generated a Shortcuts workflow that runs on my iPad and uses Working Copy to commit the changes to the site.
  • The site is hosted on Azure Storage, although I move it around a bit. For instance, it spent a lot of time on DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud… I like to keep things interesting.

What You Don’t

Software

  • This site is running atop an engine called Sushy, which was originally written in (Hy, a LISP that compiles to bytecode) but later backported to “pure” 3 to take advantage of asyncio and then turned into a static site generator.
  • The previous blog engine was , which in turn replaced a heavily customized version of PhpWiki.
  • New releases are deployed using piku, my Heroku-like deployment system.
  • All site content is managed via git, after quite a few years using for live updates before they .

Content and Design

Hardware

  • My staging environment is a , and the production site generator runs in a tiny Azure VM that only handles webhooks. Both run piku, my Heroku-like deployment service.
  • This used to run on a Linode VPS, which hosted the Snakelets application server and Varnish as a reverse proxy, doing 1.1 – 1.0 conversion and blocking out all sorts of nuisances (I left Slicehost after a brief, but painful, attempt at using Tumblr for blogging).
  • When it was initially being developed atop PhpWiki, the site used to run off an unbranded 733MHz 9.0 box (upgraded to near- levels) with 1GB RAM, hooked up to the net via a fire-walled link (capped at 20KBps outbound traffic). That relative scarcity of resources was the main driver for my relentless optimization of everything running on it in every regard, and my tweaks became somewhat of a hallmark.

In Real Life

  • My loving wife is infinitely patient with me and lets me spend a few evenings tweaking this every now and then. My kids, however, are far less forgiving, so I do it less often these days.

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