About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. I teach photographers web design and professional skills. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Its strong points include an introduction to Python, and better coverage of Django 1.0 than nearly anybody else. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

Spam Report

At least 67581 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

Most boring upgrade ever

$ sudo portupgrade php5 php5-curl php5-sqlite php5-bla bla bla...
--->  Upgrading 'php5 bla bla bla...'
...
[Updating the pkgdb bla bla... done]
$ sudo apachectl graceful
$

This was on a live server, with only the briefest of interruptions; no drama. Boring things should be boring. I love FreeBSD.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
freebsd + php + site
2 comments

Some related posts: Toolbot.com source code available on request • Akismet anti-comment-spam • Moving the blog to Django

• Comment from Chip Kaye , 3 days later

Hi Paul,

Was this FreeBSD/Darwin under OS X, or do you like to run a true/stock FreeBSD server?

thx - Chip

• Comment from Paul , 3 days later

It's honest-to-goodness FreeBSD 6.1, running in a VPS instance at JohnCompanies.com. My problem with OS X as server is that there isn't any unified package infrastructure like FreeBSD's ports or Debian's apt-get. You can use MacPorts for add-ons, and Software Update (which does have a command-line interface) for core components, but that's more work at best and a mess at worst. It's great for certain things, especially in a Mac environment (we use it at work), but for web servers it seems like more trouble than it's worth.