Technologies We Use
The creation of this site would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of literally thousands of open source programmers who have created and made available to the world some of the most incredible software around. I created to this page to acknowledge this effort and inform people about some of these wonderful tools that have been used to create this website.
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Laying the foundation for this web server is the incredible Linux Operating System. I’ve been an avid fan of Linux since about 1993. It is an incredibly robust operating system and it allows you to take a simple PC and turn it into a full blown unix-like server system. The flavor of linux I’m using at the moment is Fedora, which is an open source variant of the Red Hat Linux system. |
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The next layer is the database. I have used many open source databases in the past, and PostgreSQL is one of my favorites, but this particular website runs on a database called MySQL. MySQL has evolved over the years into and incredibly robust and and functional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). It is the workhorse that keeps track of all of the data that makes up this website. |
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The next layer in the FreeSpeech.com software stack is the Apache Web Server, from the Apache Software Foundation. The Apache Web Server is an incredibly flexible and robust piece of software that is extendable in so many ways, I couldn’t even list them all here. Apache is what actually handles the tasks of receiving incoming requests from your web browser and answering with the appropriate page. The web server software is only one of a huge number of incredibly useful pieces of software that the ASF has made available. |
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The web pages that are served up on this site are all dynamically generated, and for that type of work one requires a server-side scripting language. My favorite one, and the one that drives these pages, is PHP. I have been using PHP, in one form or another, since it was called PHP-FI nearly a decade ago. PHP is yet another incredibly versatile and powerful tool that helps make FreeSpeech.com work. |
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At the highest level of our software stack is an awesome blogging system called WordPress. I’m a relative newbie to WordPress, as this latest version of FreeSpeech.com is my first attempt to use it. So far I’m greatly impressed. It provides me with a full blown content system that allows me to focus the small amount of time I have on actually posting actual news.I’m also using a hacked up version of the WP-Autoblog plug-in by Elliott Back to syndicate content from other blogs. Thanks, Elliott! |
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In the background, I’ll always be a huge fan of the Perl programming language. I’m currently using Perl to automate a few of my back-end processes, like retrieving the headlines from some of my favorite blogs and displaying them in the sidebar of the site. Perl has been my favorite workhorse language since the early 1990’s and it is truly my programming swiss army knife. |
Many thanks to all of the thousands of people who have contributed to these open source tools and packages. FreeSpeech.com would not be possible without their hard work!