What is running this site?
Well since this is the part of the site for posting techie stuff let’s talk techie. What is running this site? We’ll start from the top.
The shiny thing you are looking at
First off, sit back and look at the site, admire the minimalist colour scheme, the well edged and proportioned layout, see how yon image draws the eye down…rather nice isn’t it? Now if you were REALLY paying attention you might have noticed that at the bottom it says:
“Original Free CSS Templates Template Modified by Jeffrey Jones”
What does this mean? Basically it means that I didn’t design the site layout. I am not an artist in any sense of the word so I used the previously mentioned website to find something I liked, then I cribbed it. “AHA” I hear you cry, “He stole the design, now I can tip off the coppers and get a nice reward”.
Unfortunately, (for you anyway), no. You see there is this thing called “Creative Commons” which is a nice licence system that allows people like me to use other people’s work (For this site template, I have to link back to the makers on each page). You can go and read up about it here.
The brains behind the perfect nose and high cheekbones
Moving one level below the shiny shiny exterior we have the CMS
What is a CMS? Well, in the old days a website was all hand-coded HTML, done by bearded men using nothing more than a text editor and a lot of patience. Any changes to the site had to be labouriously typed by hand. If you were unlucky one small change to a layout could mean updating hundreds of files.
Naturally in the modern world we are much more civilised about things and have programs to help us update sites more easily. They have nice interfaces and layouts and make processes like uploading images and big changes easier. In fact, here is a screenshot of the admin system for this very site on this very page as it is being written.
What you are looking at is Radiant which is a lean, mean CMS that doesn’t try and do everything and the kitchen sink. Out of the box…er, download it allows you to set up a basic site, but it also has a facility to allow developers to add extensions that bolt on features. Because of the ease of use and the language it is written in (more on that later), it is my CMS of choice.
If you want to learn more about Radiant then have a look at the official homepage. There is also a demo site with an example coffee themed site and a working admin system you can mess about with.
Parlez-vous Ruby?
So we have established that this very pretty (right?) site is run on a very slick CMS that is written in… ok, lets talk about that. Radiant is written in a language called Ruby which is a relatively new language written by some painfully smart Japanese man called Yukihiro ‘Matz’ Matsumoto
While Ruby was (and is) a very capable language it didn’t really come into widespread use until another annoyingly gifted person by the name of David ‘DHH’ Heinemeier Hannson created a web framework called Ruby on Rails which made writing cool websites very easy and rather enjoyable, which was a relief to many people stuck using monolithic frameworks and languages.
So running this site relies on “Radiant” which uses the “Ruby on Rails” framework which is written in the “Ruby” language… got that? Good, there will be a test later.
Memory of an Elephant
Since this site is updated dynamically and is not just a bunch of static files, we need a way to remember all the data that is constantly changing. Into the gap steps our database. In this case this site is using the popular MySQL database.
While many people will agree that it isn’t the most sophisticated or advanced database application in the world, its small size and ease of use have made it very popular for websites to store their data in.
The Foundation
In a word – Linux
In a few more words. This site is running on something called Centos which is one of the many different types of Linux-based operating systems you can choose from. What is a Linux based operating system?
Basically it fulfils the same function as the Microsoft Windows family of products. That is to provide a platform for running your applications on. Why do people use it? Apart from having pretty much all the features you would want from a modern operating system there is one huge benefit to using a Linux based operating system at home: Security.
Linux is written in a totally different fashion to Windows which makes it much much harder to break into. The number of viruses that can infect Linux is probably less than 100. Compare that to the generally accepted number of more than 50,000 viruses that affect windows and you can start to see why some people have switched from Windows. You can read more about the virus vulnerability in this Register article.
The vast majority of Linux-based operating systems are freely distributed and have versions tailored to server and desktop use as well as many more niche uses. If you are interested in a free modern OS that doesn’t suffer from viruses like Windows then have a look at the Ubuntu family of operating systems.
Conclusion
So there you have it, a brief rundown of what powers this site from top to bottom. Now if you are a geek or have been visiting some of the sites I linked to above you may have noticed something.
Q: How much did all this software cost?
A: 0, nothing, zilch, nada, bugger all, nil, not a penny, 何も.
All this software is part of the impossibly rich “Open Source” community and is classed as FOSS. Between the text you are reading down to the physical hardware this site is running on sits more than 20 million lines of code written by dedicated people and distributed for free.
FOSS Software is written mainly by people for the enjoyment of it (Originally, slightly different now, maybe another article needs writing) and distributed to others for free. Without it the internet would not be the rich and diverse environment it is today.
