col·o·phon: n. An incription placed at the end of a book or manuscript, usually with facts relative to its production.
Latin, from the Greek kolophōn, meaning summit.
— The Merriam Webster Dictionary of the English Language.
First and foremost, this site is powered by Django.
Django is a web framework written in python, which allows me to write my website in python. This is a good thing.
- Blogging functionality is provided by Djournal, which I wrote myself.
- Tagging is done through django-tagging, which is remarkably painless.
- My posts are written in ReStructured Text, which are then converted to HTML. This conversion is done by docutils. RestInPeace, or simply rip, is my own wrapper for docutils which integrates it into my site.
- Syntax highlighting is provided by Pygments. There simply is no other.
The templates and stylesheets were written completely by me, from scratch. I didn’t use any CSS frameworks, as is proven by the remarkably simple layout I’ve got. The source for those templates and the stylesheet may be found here.
This site validates “almost” HTML5, and CSS3. All of my own html is valid, the invalid parts are from the output of the docutils writer html4css1, which has some inadequacies. But I’m working on that. However, I am not using any HTML5 specific markup, because it confused me too much. Maybe after the spec is finalized, I’ll fix that up.
I say CSS3, because I use one particular feature that I’ve grown very fond of, namely @font-face. This allows me to embed fonts so that I can use whatever I want. Web designers should not be restricted to exactly 8 or so fonts. If the fonts do not strike you as different or in some way novel, you are most probably using a outdated browser. Get something newer and more standards compliant if you want to experience what eye-candy I have here.
The fonts I am using are all free, several of them are specifically designed for embedding, They are:
- Graublau Sans Web, by Georg Seifert (for the text).
- Yanone Kaffeesatz, by Jan Gerner (for the headings).
- Inconsolata, by Raph Levien (for the code).
These fonts are all amazing, and I’m very grateful to their authors for putting them out there for everyone to use.
Finally, a word on deployment.
This site is hosted at Webfaction.
Python hosting isn’t easy to come by, nor is it cheap. But Webfaction does an excellent job.
The site is deployed with apache/mod_wsgi + python2.5, running an up-to-date trunk version of Django. Up-to-date means “as often as I can be bothered updating”. Thankfully, the Django trunk is quite stable, so there haven’t been too many issues that I haven’t been able to sort out myself. Static media is served by nginx, separate from the apache instance that runs Django.
