In which I tell you, in two installments, how I run cscheid.net. Here, I will give an overview of the backend of the site. Next, I will write about the user-visible aspects.

Hosting

I use Linode to get a (virtual) box with root privileges. I share one physical host with 3 other OS instances, and so far I have had no problems with resource contention. The cheapest plan is USD20.00/month, and has enough disk and RAM to do fun things; I’m running Lucid Lynx on the machine. Linode’s monitoring infrastructure is especially good (and includes iPhone and iPad apps which beep if you run out of bandwidth or memory, for example). As an example, the machine hosting my virtual image had a hardware failure, and their watchdogs caught the problem before I did.

PLT Web Server

The website itself uses Racket’s web server libraries. xexprs are much more pleasant to work with than raw HTML. And although the huge libraries and popularity make me a Python fan, Racket is obviously a much better language to write for the web than PHP, Python, Perl or just about anything else I tried. I’m not sure how this setup will handle heavy traffic, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

In addition, the web server itself does not directly handle traffic: I was too concerned about writing my own applications running as root (for port 80), and I didn’t want to learn more about security than I absolutely have to. The solution, as suggested by the Racket documentations, was to use Apache to proxy the requests to my webserver running with reduced privileges. This has the advantage that it will be easy to switch to static content (or, say, serving from memcached) whenever necessary. I haven’t written the code for that yet.

Right now, the whole website runs on 800 lines of code.

Scribble

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I really don’t like Wordpress’s posting infrastructure. WYSIWIG is very convenient, but Wordpress’s rendition was never particularly consistent. The road to full control of Web content ends at raw HTML files, but the separation of content and presentation was important to me when I change the look of the website. I wanted something like LaTeX, but which also let control how it compiles down to HTML: enter Scribble.

Scribble is a ``system for writing library documentation, user guides, and tutorials’’. Designed by Matthew Flatt, Eli Barzilay and Robert Findler, the syntax feels superficially like a variant of LaTeX. However, a Scribble document is actually a Racket module, and all the translation happens at read-time.

Scribble feels like LaTeX with Scheme under the hood. It lets me write with a much more pleasant syntax, and it lets me cleanly separate content and appearance by writing the right code. Every post on this blog is a Scribble file (2019 edit: you could see the Scribble source for this at some point in the past, but now this is a boring Jekyll site, sorry!)

Scribble typically only supports HTML generation as a batch process, but I hacked together something based on Racket’s dynamic loading mechanism which seems to work so far. This setup is nice in that modules are only loaded the first time a request arrives at the server, and so access times are pretty acceptable.

Analytics

I don’t have enough traffic to need any more analytics than what Google Analytics gives me. The one thing I’d like to know better is how many people read this via RSS feeds, and I’m not sure what’s the best to get to that information. Monitoring server logs, for example, doesn’t work in the case of Google Reader, which I’m guessing accounts for a big chunk of my traffic. Any ideas?