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 still tweaking.
  • The web thumbnails that grace the linkblog entries are generated by either PhantomJS or WebThumb, a fantastic little service that has a gazillion options.
  • The site is hosted on Azure, although I move it around a bit. For instance, it spent a lot of time on DigitalOcean, which I still use for some stuff.

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 recently backported to “pure” 3 to take advantage of asyncio in the future.
  • The previous blog engine was , which in turn replaced a heavily customized version of PhpWiki.
  • New versions are deployed using piku, my Heroku-like deployment system.
  • All site content is automagically managed via , which has provided me with (free) cloud storage and faultless, fast file replication for many years now.

Content and Design

Hardware

  • My staging environment is a , which I upgraded to from a basic model B recently. 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 and less often.

This page is referenced in: