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.

• 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.

• This site is running atop an engine called Sushy, which was originally written in (Hy, a LISP that compiles to Python bytecode) but later backported to “pure” Python 3 to take advantage of asyncio and then turned into a static site generator.
• The previous blog engine was Yaki, 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 Dropbox for live updates before they lost the plot.

• The previous site design was was called serif. The one before, called less, was heavily influenced by Shaun Inman and Khoi Vinh, who inspired me to see how far I could go with halfway decent typography and minimal styling.
• Previous designs were based on Kubrick by Michael Heilemann. Several years ago, I ported and contributed the design to PhpWiki, and Reini Urban added it to the main source tree.
• The Flash slideshow used atop pages in that design was a modified version of this one by Todd Dominey, who is also the creator of Slide Show Pro, which I used in my [Photo Album] for several years until end of January 2008.
• Other Flash headers that cropped up now and then were based on the amazing work of Jared Tarbell, who published a number of Open Source designs on levitated.net.

• My staging environment is a Raspberry Pi, 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 HTTP 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 RedHat 9.0 Linux box (upgraded to near-Fedora levels) with 1GB RAM, hooked up to the net via a fire-walled ADSL 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 HTTP tweaks became somewhat of a hallmark.

• 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.