Colophon Redux
Colophon Redux
Thursday, 23 April 2015 22:21 Hrs
❝ Seldomlogical is built using some simple ideas in mind.

Back in 2008, I whipped up this site [0] with two hundred line hack using a newly created web framework called web.py and a brand new google project, App Engine. [1] From 2008 to today, that’s how seldomlogical worked. From the user perspective it looked like plain HTML pages being served. Behind the scenes, code read markdown and converted it to HTML.

❝ Every time my blog ran, a little bit of Aarons code would execute

This was prior to the various web frameworks for python we take for granted today. Web.py [2],[3],[4] utilised WSGI [5] and I chose googles new toy, GAE to run it.

Hosting For Ten Dollars

Now to the fun bit. I wanted to get a blog up, but not spend the hundreds of dollars using a dedicated host. Instead I took up a very limited google offer: pay ten US dollars, hosting included. No catch, just be the early bird.

❝ I was in the first batch of 10,000 users for AppEngine

The total cost per year, ten dollars, each year for seven years. For that ten dollars I also got access to google email services with the domain.

❝ with gmail, spying is for free

For eight years this small site ran without changing a line of code. I got email and spying for free.

Growing pains

As the years passed, the once simple GAE became the bloated AppEngine. Layers of new technologies were required to run a simple blog. Finally the datastore I used was retired. I continued to use email and manually update the site. Something had to change and eventually my hand was forced as the datastore was made read only. So I conceived a cunning plan and this site was born

Melbourne based

This site and company are hosted locally, Serversaurus, ~~so is my email, fastmail.fm~~. [7] I won’t go into the details, suffice to say this site is entirely static. No databases, no server—side code, just plain HTML generated from text files using a bunch of python modules.

Reference

[0] Colophon, ‟Seldomlogical is built using some simple ideas in mind”,

[1] GAE or Google App Engine.

[2] webpy, ‟a small fast python based web framework created by Aaron Swartz built in 2008.”

  • http://webpy.org

[3] Aaron Swartz, creator of web.py among other things.

  • http://www.aaronsw.com

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

[4] Python programming language.

  • http://python.org

[5] WSGI, ‟Web Server Gateway Interface”

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Server_Gateway_Interface

[6] Serversaurus

  • https://flickr.com/photos/bootload/17240141992

  • https://serversaurus.com.au

[7] Fastmail.fm, I thought fastmail was locally hosted, not so. Pretty secure, not as secure as I first thought.

  • https://www.fastmail.com
―~♞~―

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