Introduction¶

This website is built with Sphinx, a documentation tool for Python projects that is versatile enough to be used for other tasks. If you’re comfortable with Python and reStructuredText it is an absolutely fantastic tool that you should start using immediately, and if you’re not it shouldn’t take long to learn how to use it.

This website once ran under a system called E-fort, that was written in PHP back when that was “the in thing”. Up until February 2006 it ran on website-xml, which was a tangled web of GNU make, GNU autoconf, GNU automake, XSLT, Python and bash. Up until October 2006 this site was running on the atom-cms system, but now that the blog is dead a different system is needed. And finally, prior to Sphinx it used erbium which I suspect will be last hobby CMS as Web development is one of those interests I’ve lost in recent years.

Content creation¶

Content is added using a text editor, and is simply a matter of creating a file in the appropriate place in the hierarchy. The format used for the entries is almost standard reST, but it is peppered with the occasional custom directive for features I like to use that aren’t supported in reST.

And finally...¶

I’d like to believe that all my pages are valid XHTML and CSS and all my feeds are valid Atom. Web standards are important, and I try to stick to them. Check the content against validators if you wish, and shame me if I’ve failed :) I believe strongly enough that each XHTML/ CSS/Atom file is run through a series of validation tests, and if any of them fail make stops the build.

Once make has fired off all the processes and the build is complete, I have a static tree that can be uploaded to the UKFSN servers. And with the joy that is rsync I don’t even need to bother maintaining a record of what has been pushed to the server.