I thought it might be nice to give some information on how this blog is setup.

Web framework#

First off, the blog has been made using python, with the pyramid application framework. I compared various python Web frameworks and pyramid seemed to have good documentation, plenty of support and a nice api. And they also have some nice tutorials on getting started, and some starter templates.

I considered django but pyramid seemed a lot more flexible. Things like being able to choose any database and template engine you want, without things being hard to get working together, were a draw for me.

Servers#

The nice thing about python is that most Web frameworks use WSGI, which means you can switch between different Web application servers without too much fuss.

For development, I tend to use waitress as it is the default Web application server that comes with pyramid.

For production, I have used waitress, cherrypy and uwsgi at different times. At the time of writing I am using uwsgi. But they have all generally been ok to use.

In front of the Web application server I have nginx. Nginx is awesome, in terms of its size, speed and resource usage. It also has native support for the uwsgi protocol which is one of the reasons why I am using uwsgi as the Web application server.

More out of caution than anything else, I have the whole website sat behind cloudflare.

Dynamic DNS#

My ip address keeps changing, so I have to use something like ddclient to keep cloudflare updated with my ip address. I don’t like ddclient though (it’s written in perl and is a pain to install manually) so I’ve written a basic python script to do the job for me instead. Nothing fancy, but it does the job.