This is a colophon — a description about the production and details of this site. It’s incredibly verbose, partially because of my obsessive-compulsiveness over the little details. (Oh hell, the site’s called “minutiæ” for a reason.)
Source code
This site is open source! Most of the files powering this site — including Django backend code, templates, CSS design files, and server configuration examples — are available on github.
Source code is distributed under the New BSD License. (See LICENSE.txt in the repository.)
Design
- Pages are 500px wide, in a one-column setup.
- Main header fonts are generally Helvetica Neue Light, or if that’s not available, Arial (or another system sans-serif) is used instead.
- The body (and small header) font is Gentium Basic.
- Custom fonts (including Gentium Basic) are loaded via the CSS3 @font-face tag, rather than SIFR or Cufón. You can read about that here or here.
- And again, this is open all source. You can find the design-specific files here and here within the repository.
Backend
- The meat-and-potatoes of the site consist of a custom-built blogging app (among other tools) programmed in Python and powered by the Django framework.
- I’m using Django’s trunk version and update it frequently. My server says I’m running the following Django version:
1.2.1.
- I’m using Django’s trunk version and update it frequently. My server says I’m running the following Django version:
- Some other dependencies:
- I use typogrify to keep headlines neat and tidy. (Which in turn uses Smartypants.)
- django-contact-form powers the contact form.
- akismet.py helps the contact form filter out spam submissions.
Hosting
- This site is hosted on a 256 slice at Slicehost, in my good ol’ hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. They rock.
- My server runs Ubuntu 9.10 using nginx in front of Apache, which serves Django via mod_wsgi. Data lives in PostgreSQL. Memcached is used here and there to speed things up a bit — nginx even directly serves pages from the Django cache, for awesome performance.
- Some example configuration files are stored within the repository, if you”re interested in how I did this
- I generally upload multimedia files to Amazon S3/CloudFront.
- Text-based static files (like the site’s styles) are served on a Google App Engine instance, since Amazon S3 doesn’t gzip compress.
- You can view my
app.yamland my “push to server”script if you want to know how I get things into my App Engine instance.
- You can view my
- Oh, and I register most of my domains through GoDaddy and the tig.as domain is registered directly at the .AS Domain Registry. I manually edit my DNS records in SliceHost’s panel.
License
Unless otherwise noted, all content on this site is © 2001–2010 Mike Tigas. all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted:
- Text content:
- You’re free to quote and otherwise reuse text content within the bounds of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. This means that I explicitly give you the ability to quote me, but you must give me credit and you cannot use any content for commercial purposes without my written consent. (And I do give permission — just ask!)
- Photos:
- Most of my Flickr images have Creative Commons licensing — click the image and check the original photo page for details. If you can’t find license information, don’t use it without asking.
- Design and backend source code:
Questions?
Questions about any of this? Seek out my contact information and ask me — I’d be glad to tell you more.