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Technical Details

If you're here, you're interested in some juicy technical details about how this site runs. You'll get them, but first a warning: the details here are kind of gory and you'll probably be pretty lost if you don't have at least a working knowledge of programming and databasing.

OK. So the basic engine behind this site is called PHP. It's a great little scripting engine that's been around for a while and is perfect for a site like this.

The site used to run on a super-fancified architecture that would have been great if this project were a huge website with distribution to channels like email and wap and rdf and all kinds of syndication, ad nauseum. But since it's not, I took the chance to rewrite the whole site when it came.

With PHP, it's easy to look stuff up in a database. Many things are dynamically generated each time the page is loaded. The header and footer, and the contents of the dates, news, gallery, and discussion pages. The old incarnation tried to keep in-core copies of the data for faster lookup -- a case study in the pitfalls of unnecessary performance tuning.

The whole thing runs on Apache, with PostgreSQL for the database. Much simpler than the Apache/JVM/Tomcat/Cocoon/RDBMS software soup of the site's previous incarnation. And since I'm doing less research and more development (after doing lots of research with the old codebase) it's just as easy to work with. This incarnation is running on a dual PPro 200 machine, leaving my beloved P133 for personal use.

I'm also thinking in a couple of months, as features get added and the site gets more robust, usable and maintainable, that I'll release the source for it as a GPL sourceforge project. If you've never heard of sourceforge, check it out. It's one of the coolest things out there for dweeby losers like me.

If you have any questions or comments or suggestions, or especially if you'd like to help, mail me at webmaster@2ndset.net and let me know.