Update 2017-10-23: This site started out as a small Django app that I wrote as a learning exercise. For several years I regularly posted new content and kept the site up-to-date. After that there were several more years where I didn't write any new posts, but I still maintained the site; and eventually I decided to "archive" it by turning it into a static HTML site that could be hosted indefinitely with zero maintenance without any security risks on Github Pages. I removed all comments, many of which were spam and/or XSS attempts and removed the more dynamic features like infinite scrolling and search, and just let the content stand as a reminder of simpler times. What follows is a description of the site in its original incarnation.

Style & Design

The design is entirely mine, except where otherwise stated below. It doesn't use or build on any "theme." It's a pure CSS design built on semantic, HTML5 compliant markup. I use many advanced CSS3 features to make it look great in modern browsers. It should however be perfectly serviceable in older browsers and accessible to screen readers.

Most websites remind me of magazines, just one big advertisement. When I think of content, I think of textbooks and college lectures. So that's what I want my site to look like.

Most of the icons are from Mark James's excellent (and free!) Silk icon set or Damien Guard's Silk Companion icon set.

I also use a large, glossy RSS icon from gojol23 (are there really 22 other gojels?) on deviant art.

Labels and headers use the Garamond serif font stack, one of Michael Truck's 8 definitive web font stacks It has a nice classical feel, and it looks particularly stylish in italic.

The content font is Verdana, which I believe is the most readable of the standard sans-serif web fonts. I feel screen resolutions are not yet generally high enough to make serif fonts maximally readable in large doses. The code font is Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, primarily because I use the same font for gVIM. The main content is 500 pixels wide, no more, because narrow text can be read faster.

The site's accent color is maroon, chosen mainly because it's easy to remember its hexadecimal representation (#800000) but also because many books I respect, such as the O'Reilly series, use it.

For each article, I choose an image to represent it, usually a Creative Commons licensed photo from flickr. You can click the larger version of any of these pictures to see the original source. Images which are not clickable are my own.

The style element I love best is how some items "lift up" on mouseover thanks to a small relative offset and a drop shadow. It makes them feel deliciously clickable.

Software Stack

This site is built on the Django framework. It is intentionally minimalist, with only a few hundred lines of code. It doesn't use any pre-configured blogging software.

It uses django-thumbs, which uses PIL, to generate thumbnails.

Content is authored using John Gruber's Markdown syntax and expanded to HTML by the python implementation.

Analytics are provided by the free version of Google Analytics.

Some pages also use jQuery. I let your browser load it from Google's CDN so you don't have to wait.

It uses the simple, elegant, and public-domain one-file RDBMS sqlite.

The domain name is the same as mine: Oran Looney.

The site is hosted on a rackspace cloud unmanaged virtual server running Ubuntu, Apache and mod_wsgi. (Ubuntu isn't a great choice for a server OS: for example it runs inetd instead of xinetd out of the box. But it's familiar to me because I run an Ubuntu desktop at home.)

Administering the server from the ground up is a fun challenge. I can spin up a clean virtual machine and turn it into a production webserver running my custom app in a matter of minutes, with complete control on every level.