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 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.

• This site is running atop an engine called Sushy, which was originally written in (Hy, a LISP that compiles to Python bytecode) but recently backported to “pure” Python 3 to take advantage of asyncio in the future.
• The previous blog engine was Yaki, 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 Dropbox, which has provided me with (free) cloud storage and faultless, fast file replication for many years now.

• 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 Source designs on levitated.net.

• My staging environment is a Raspberry Pi 2, 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 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 and less often.