Tech

What's this site running?

Ok I stole that line from the venerable Netcraft site with the same name, but essentially it serves the same purpose: To define the tools and technologies used to power this here website thingy.

First off, I'm a big technology tramp and constantly fiddle with foreign tools just for the experience. I like to play with emerging tech - so much so that this blog gets blown up usually twice a year - but sometimes I find something that I keep coming back to over the years. There are two things that fall in this category.

• PHP. I keep getting roped into PHP usually due to work, either because a client needs it, or those are the resources I have available to get something done.
• Typo. This is a blogging engine that works the way I do. Sure there are others that are more popular (Wordpress), or have more features (Joomla), or are on more bleeding edge platforms (Calipso), but Typo just feels right.

In the end I decided to just slap another fresh Typo install on the server and get to it. The reason behind this is that I am doing a great many things right now, all at once, and I don't want to lose any time fretting about with a blogging platform. I have barely the time to blog as it is, so the blog platform needs to just work.

So here's the summary of what is under the hood:

• Linux. The operating system that runs the internet. I'm a server guy, and we seem to gravitate towards either debian or centos, and I chose debian.
• nginx. Why do you put yourself through all that pain by using something else? Either Apache kills you with RAM consumption or LightTPD kills you with segfaults on multi-core machines. Just ain't needed anymore, come on and stop the madness.
• ruby on rails. Yes there's actually some cool stuff coming from the rails community, not just a bunch of turtleneck totin' highfalutin city slickers with Harry Potter spectacles.
• mongrel_cluster. You gotta use something to run that code, right?
• typo. My favorite blogging engine, regardless of platform.
• MySQL. The Internal Revenue Service of web apps, it's clunky, ugly and forced upon you more often than you want.

Since this blog is powered by typo, I'll probably end up writing separate posts about the different tweaks I do along the way. At launch I used the 5.0.7 release, which still had some bugs. Not only will those bugs get fixed, but there are a great many interesting plugins and themes available too. I'm sure to take advantage of something.