The Bone Yard

The End is the Beginning

Completion of my blog project, and what comes next.

It's taken quite some time, but I've finally completed a custom blog platform on top of which I can create, present and catalog my posts. It would have been much quicker and much simpler to adopt some off-the-shelf blog tool such as Wordpress, but then, where would the fun have been in that?

In actuallity, I'm not really finished with my blog platform. There are still some features I want to tack on, but I'd reached a point of diminishing returns on my time investment. Why spend more time perfecting the last 10% of the functionality at the expense of testing the rest of the 90%?

As far the blog platform, it is an app stack consisting of:

• CentOS 7 host, deployed inside of a Linode VPS instance.
• PostgreSQL for storing the blog posts and metadata.
• Nginx, serving up the site's static content and reverse proxying requests to the blog app.
• Pyramid, a web framework for request routing (vaguely model/view/controller like).
• Gunicorn for a WSGI layer between Nginx and Pyramid.
• Mako, a templating engine for embedding and substitution of markup text.
• Python is the glue holding together the blog logic and data acccess.

It took me a while to select the platform pieces and learn them to an extent where I could wield them for this project. I'm still learning on the fly, but I very much like how the elements of the platform fit together and complemented each other. By and large, everything is working. What remains are really tasks for syndication, automation, logging and enhanced user interaction (i.e. a comment area).

While it's (almost) the end of the blog development phase, this marks the beginning of actual blogging phase. In some respects, this will prove harder than the actual development. Being the first blog I've ever maintained, it's going to take me a while for me to figure out a rhtyhm for posting, and trial and error for choosing subject matter that keeps me engaged and maybe, just maybe, proves interesting for someone out there reading. This is definitely uncharted territory for me, but I'm excited to have a platform to jot down my thoughts now, as much for my own benefit as for others. I'll also have an evolving project to test out new tech and programmatic tools/concepts. So as I start ramping up my blog posts, give me a shout if you have any feedback; eventually you'll be able to do that in-line with the actual posts. Hopefully there's lots more to come; stay tuned.