Looking inside the magic box
Running a website the size of Nouse.co.uk presents a number of challenges, least of all in infrastructure – providing not only the main website and the features that support it, but staging areas, development areas, SVN version control, development tools, issue tracking, wikis…
Added features bring unexpected consequences, and even unexpected uses, as the York students behind Twitterfall, Nouse Computing Officer Tom Brearley and David Somers, discovered following yesterday’s problems on the Telegraph website. The problems we experience at Nouse aren’t on the same scale, but they, and the solutions to them, are interesting. Tweets like JTownend’s show that people like to know what’s going on behind the scenes, and Brearley’s reply of “magic” leaves a lot to be desired.
I’ve an advocate of free and open-source software, where people can see the work of others (the “source code” – the recipes that make up the software) and modify and improve them as they see fit, and hopefully allowing others to do the same, resulting in a great group-think resulting in an excellent overall product.
Blogs are intended to be highly personal. They’re not “print quality”, they don’t go through an editor first, and they don’t even get sub-edited (too much). They’re aimed to be a direct tap to the heart of the blogger, and collectively the blogs coming on Nouse over the following weeks will cover a much wider subject matter than articles have covered before. And by restricting one into a particular blog, you just need to pick and choose which ones you want.
In this blog I am to cover the interesting problems that come up with running Nouse.co.uk, and demystify some of the behind-the-scenes “magic” – putting this knowledge and my solutions into the so-called “blogosphere” for other people to benefit from. Eventually (when the code is relevant and mature enough) I also aim to release some of the custom code that’s gone into Nouse.co.uk as WordPress plugins. Approximately half of the plugins installed into our WordPress were written internally, with the rest being ones from WordPress.org.
I should probably finish off by saying who I am, as my name normally doesn’t grace the side of an article. As it says up there, I’m the Technical Director of Nouse. I’m in charge of leading a team of 3 amazing developers, pretty much everything to do with the website short of the actual words on the page, and I moderate most of the comments that come through. I’m also pretty outspoken, have an opinion on everything and try to get involved with campus politics – voting, attending hustings, former JCRC officer and even had a couple of UGM motions passed. If you know me, it’s probably because my name appears in the comments section under too many of the articles on the site.
This blog is aimed to be a bit technical, so I hope that’s not geeked anyone out too much!
Looking forward to hearing about the challenges you face at Nouse. Perhaps they’ll inspire me to write about the challenges we face at Twitterfall, though Twitterfall is a little more closed-source than you (probably much to your dismay).
Perhaps a bit more sub-editing would be a good thing, Mr. Northwood
. But then, the same principle should probably be applied across the board at Nouse. Computer Scientists shouldn’t be able to do a Linguistician’s or English student’s job, amirite?
Chris, as a long-term fan of the Nouse site – I look forward to this insight.
Watching from the Ents corner at election night, it was good fun to see your presumably less technical Nouse colleagues huddled round MRTG/RRDtool graphs watching the hits roll in…
Heh, I wish that’s what MRTG was monitoring. It’s more of a “if that line goes over that line, the site’s fucked”
Just noticed that Nouse had a website on Twitter. I used to be the editor back in 1991. We spent the whole budget on some Apple Macs – and we only kept going as British Rail rang up to advertise with Vision, and we pretended we were them to get the income. You’ve clearly come a long way!