I've done away that clumsy old database thing. Webserver too. My blog is now statically generated. What follows is a quick brain dump of my experiences getting it up and running. First up, here's the various moving parts that make the magic happen: jilcrow, Dropbox, Amazon S3, s3cmd, incron, and Disqus.

So I've been hacking PHP since early highschool. I was introduced to Java during my University course. I taught myself Python not long after. I even have some rudimentary knowledge of C. But one thing I've never done is tackle a lisp. Or a functional language. So when I set about for a new language to learn, I stumbled on Clojure, and almost instantly fell in love. It's so different from any other language I've worked with before that it's like a breath of fresh air, and requires such a different way to approach problems.

Since I started writing code in Python, I've been a big fan of vim. Sure, at first it was a bizarre alien creature, but over time I've learnt it's quirks, and gotten quite comfortable.

So I have this horrible habit of coming up with a great idea, or deciding I need to do something, and then having forgotten about it within an hour.

So I started using screen a while back, and it was pretty useful. Being able to leave off whatever I'm working on from work/uni, and get straight back into it from home was a godsend.

The django docs have a pretty good page on using fastcgi in a shared hosting environment, but there was always one part that bugged me:

So I generally don't write about my day job, but today we had a somewhat... eventful day in the office. An ESX machine failed, our backup procedures had not been adhered to properly, and for a while it seemed like we'd lost all the data. Miraculously, after the most frustrating and stressful day I've had in recent memory, it all started working again. But that's just not the real story I'm writing about today.

So I have this alarm clock that occasionally ends up being an hour too fast or too slow.

A few days ago, I had need for a simple issue tracker I could embed inside my projects. I found this ticket, however the code was written for django 0.96...

So just a few useful links I've found that I figured I would post, a) for my own sake, as I'm sure these are things I'll need again at some point, and b) for the benefit of anyone else who stumbles across this post.

So my laptop has been sent in for warranty repairs twice now. This morning, it has once again started failing to boot. Unfortunately, this time it's warranty is now well and truly expired, so there's now nothing to be done for it, but to scrap it. Unfortunately, Pioneer Computing's products just don't seem to be built very well.

So a few things have happened over the past couple of days.

So I conducted an experiment. I added a small Google Adsense ad to my site. 300+ page impressions later, not a single click. maybe if I start getting tens of thousands of hits a month, they might come back. But whilst I'm getting hundreds of hits, there's no money in it.

This is simply amazing. CSS3 is a wonder to behold. The alphabet rendered entirely in CSS3 and The Opera logo rendered entirely in CSS3. I'm not sure if either of these make for practical usage of the power CSS3 gives, but they do certainly demonstrate the limits (or lack of) that web developers can now start pushing towards.

JustinSteward.com has now been moved to it's own server! Well, relatively speaking. It is now hosted on a physical server running Proxmox for virtualisation, and Cherokee for the webserver. In the coming days, Calsanne.com and RenShinDo will also be moved on to the new server as their own seperate virtual server instances. It should be immediately obvious that there has been a massive speed improvement to this site, as there will be to the others in the coming weeks.