Paj's Home: Site Info: How it works

How it works

Hosting

This website is running on a box called schubert, hosted in the Abel racks at Scolocate, a large hosting centre in Scotland. The hardware is modest, but more than adequate: an AMD K6/400 with 64MB RAM and 18GB hard disk. It runs about 200 websites in total, for a company called RDNS.

Software

All the server software I use is free:

Server setup

pajhome.org.uk is an Apache virtual host, with *.pajhome.org.uk as an alias. The website is mostly static, but a couple of CGI scripts work using a MySQL back-end. mod_rewrite is used to redirect people when a page changes its URL. For example, try going to /progs/vrml/vectors.html and look at the URL you land on. Most of the pages are uploaded from my computer, but the stats section is automatically updated by Webalizer each night.

Building the Site

I've written my own program called Pipp to build websites. The version I use has a few hacky features that aren't in the released version, to format source code, create graphical titles, do the navigation bar and so on. Some of these only work under NT, so I build the site from .pip into .html on my home computer. Every so often I make a .tar.gz file, transfer this to my server using scp, and then unpack it to publish the new site.

I must mention one piece of commercial software now - TextPad. This is a fantastic Windows text editor that makes all my file editing quick and reliable. It is dead easy to integrate with the command line, so that "tp filename" loads the file straight away, and the call doesn't block.

HTML Compatibility

I aspire to make the site HTML 4 and XHTML compatible, and to display correctly in Netscape 4, Mozilla, IE and Opera. I've no desire to maintain backwards compatibility with pre-CSS browsers. The site will never require Java or JavaScript for basic navigation, but will use them as bells and whistles.

The guest book contains some clever fall-back code:

With JavaScript enabled, a popup window is opened with size, etc. specified, and the return value prevents the link being followed. Without JavaScript, the link is followed, and the target= attribute opens a new window, albeit without the options the JavaScript is able to set.