Jason R. Fruit stay-at-home father and computer programmer

How is the Site Built?

I use CherryPy, Cheetah Templates, and Python Markdown on top of Google's App Engine's Python API. That's not because it's the best way to use App Engine; it's because that's the fastest way I've found to build a useful website. The RSS feeds are generated by PyRSS2Gen, which I've used in the past and with which I am pretty happy.

I'm pleased with CherryPy; I switched to it from Karrigell, which had a similar API but broke in exciting new ways with each release. It would have been difficult or impossible to use with Google App Engine, anyway. CherryPy shares with it the quality of letting me do what I want the way I want, unlike a lot of web frameworks, such as Django.

Cheetah Templates are the best; it seems like every other templating tool is so concerned to provide Model-View-Controller separation that they make it difficult to do things that a programmer wants to do. Let me separate those areas if I choose, but please (I'm looking at you, Django) let me do it my way.

Markdown is a simple format for text that will find its way to the Web. It was inspired by the formatting conventions of plain-text e-mail, and it serves pretty well for my purposes, even though it was designed by a Mac fanboy.

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