Frontend: All page templates are valid (X)HTML. However, I choose not to claim valid XHTML (and no doc type declaration) since I can’t guarantee that blog posts I write are compliant! The site uses standard CSS and uses the Blueprint CSS Framework for the grid layout of the page. The site design is entirely original (if not simple and bland – I’m not very good with website design yet!). The site has minor usage of JQuery Javascript library in some parts.
Backend: The server side uses Python and Django behind mod_python on Apache, with a MySQL database. The following Django apps and Python libraries are used:
- custom made blog application by myself
- built-in (contrib) apps: admin, comments, sitemaps, flatpages
- django-tagging
- django-xmlrpc
- comment_utils for advanced comment moderation features
- template_utils
- django-pingback
- Beautiful Soup for XML/HTML parsing
- Pygments for syntax highlighting. See the Pygments Demo!
- Feedparser
- Markdown2 so that I can post using Markdown.
As is typical for hobbyist software development, I started working on this site with only a minimal set of features considered, but as I kept working I kept wanting to add more stuff. Some notable custom-made features:
- XMLRPC server, supporting Metaweblog API and Pingbacks. I actually only added the metaweblog support so I could post from Flock
- Autocard support (same as my previous Autocard plugin for WP) and syntax highlighting of code.
- Automatic extraction of twitter and delicious entries into the sidebar
- Gravatar support for comments
All entries from the previous “roytang / weblog”, “Roy on Magic” and “Roy on Django” have been imported using a custom data conversion script, but nothing is perfect so some of the older posts may be badly formatted. (Comment on those posts!)
Hosting: Provided by Webfaction.
See Also