Technical Details
SOPEF’s Operation
2005-12-09 Update: Most of this is now inaccurate. A shiny new colophon will be written up when the new system is rolled out more fully.
For some odd yet completely understandable reason, people like to know the technical details behind a site’s operation. Or perhaps I am hallucinating, and webmasters just like to babble about how their beloved sites work.
In any case, dear reader, here is an opportunity for an inside sneak peek at SOPEF’s operations.
Our content management system is CityDesk, a creation of Fog Creek Software. Our maniacal editor maintains the precious CityDesk file under his control, although periodic backups are made off-site. Ordinarily, contributors e-mail their creations to Mr. Quince for him to perform his sadistic editorial manipulations; when feasible, authorized parties are allowed to log in over a Windows network tunneled through a secure VPN and held together with chewing gum and shoelaces and perform direct operations on the precious CityDesk file.
When the time comes to publish, Mr. Quince fires up PuTTY SSH to his webhost and flies carrier pigeons through the resulting SSH tunnel to bring new articles and Log entries to the webserver. No, really; he’s never heard of FTP. And running physical layer through a link layer tunnel is a really neat trick. Or something.
Upon arriving at the host server, SOPEF’s precious packets are passed to the charge of the Apache Web Server. This isn’t a religion or anything; we could use any HTTP server we wanted, but Apache is the daemon du jour. Apache, which our ISP runs on some flavor or another of Linux, then shuffles the packets out towards you, the reader, when your Web browser issues a GET request. That’s an HTTP GET request, which asks for Web documents, not a Jewish GET request, which ends marriages (just in case you were wondering).
Now, is that 31337 or what? We think it’s pretty simple.
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