BAZOMBO: a discursive miscellany of topics

My work here is done

Monday, October 22 2007

A few weeks ago I set out to write myself a blogging engine, which I have dubbed “Burble”. The motivation was partly to get off Blosxom, which I’d been finding pretty limiting, but mostly so I could come to grips with developing Python web applications.

And now I’m done. It was surprisingly easy. I’m even running on my own tiny frameworklet, which I have called Whisky, after WSGI. I’m going to put the code online soon, not because it’s ready for other people, but as an example (or a warning).

It’s pretty damned zippy too, even with all my old content from the other site. Network latency is by far the biggest factor in Burble’s performance. I’ve done my best to tweak that by turning on compression in Apache and minimising the markup. I have found YSlow invaluable for this.

(It’s worth a post on its own, but by judicious use of mod_deflate and mod_expires, guided by YSlow, I managed to get one of our indispensible extranet apps at work loading in less than 5 seconds, down from about 20, rendering it far, far more usable.)

 Now I have to find something else to do. I think the Ruminator is next. I have plans to use some stemming software and a bit of Bayesian analysis and a better visual representation that indicates links between stories.

1 comment

Tags: burble ~ web development ~ yslow ~ apache

roads and trees

Tuesday, October 09 2007

(12:28:59) Stephen Judd: i don’t know why it disturbs me so much to think of apache having bugs
(12:29:01) Stephen Judd: but it does
(12:29:04) Julian Melville: turns out that’s some internal apache error code that was leaking out unintentionally
(12:29:15) Stephen Judd: i mean, its __apache__
(12:29:16) Julian Melville: yeah i reckon… apache is like roads or trees, it’s just there

1 comment

Tags: apache

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