About This Site

I love programming. With code, the idea takes form as soon as you've fully expressed it; it becomes real. Mathematicians and philosophers never get that feedback; their ideas stay ideas. Scientists and architects do get to see their ideas expressed in reality, but only months or years later. The tight feedback loop of code-compile-run is what makes programming so enjoyable.

I think about programming a lot, so I often have ideas that don't have immediate application. It seems a shame to see an idea go to waste, so I've decided to publish some of them here. I write essays on a variety of subjects, all closely related to computers, programming, and software development.

Focus

It's all about content. Everything on the site should link to content, organize content, or be content; otherwise, it's an error.

It's not always a goal I achieve; I'm often too wordy, for example. But parsimonious concision is the ideal I work towards.

Style

Most websites remind me of magazines, and by association, advertising. When I think of content, I think of books and college lectures, of students hastily drawing freehand diagrams to illustrate the theorems they're passionately explaining. I want my site to look like the cross between a textbook, a lecture, and a neatly done homework assignment.

The site is styled entirely with CSS; even the icons are referenced in the CSS file. Speaking of which, the icons are from Mark James' excellent (and free!) Silk icon set.

The main font is Verdana, chosen as the most readable web font, and I've set letter and line spacing to make it as clean and readable as possible. If you know of a clearer type, please let me know! The font and color scheme emphasizes the whiteboard theme and the casual nature of the essays.

The header image is a UML diagram. It says several things about me, including the fact that I'm the kind of person who would describe himself in UML.

Framework

This site is built on the Django framework. It is intentionally minimalist, with only a few hundred lines of code. I'd use less if I could.

Django is almost overkill; I could have used any of the popular blogging tools, but I played with Legos as a kid. I prefer starting with a loose pile of parts and putting it all together over customizing a pre-defined template.

Hosting

This site is hosted by djangodomain.com. I've found them responsive and helpful. This site's on a shared box but has it's own Apache virtual server.

Domain Name

The domain name is me: Oran Looney.

Tools

I use gVim and IDLE to edit source code, and WinSCP and PuTTY to deploy files to the server. SVN provides version control. The images are scanned in with a HP Photosmart C3180, a cheap but solid combo printer/scanner combo. The elegant markdown package speeds content creation. Google Analytics collects statistics. And of course, Python and the Django framework make it all possible.

Compliance

I use the W3C validation service to check the major pages. At the moment, everything validates as strict XHTML:

Since the pages are dynamically generated, what is true at the moment may not be true in the future, but I do try to comply with the XHTML standard.

Creative Flow

Most of my essays begin life as a few scribles on an index card — I can't control my brain so I try to capture interesting thoughts before I forget them. I try to choose the more original and more involved ideas and write about them in depth. The essays are written in plain text, using markdown syntax. I work with pen and paper at hand: when I need to draw a diagram, I do it immediately and go back to typing. When the article is done, I scan all the images in. I dissect the scan into several GIF files and add image references to the article. Then everything gets committed version control. When everything's done, I sync to the server.

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