closedsrc.org is my personal web site, which contains a collection of thoughts, opinions, random ramblings... and just so happens to include a blog.
Behind the closedsrc.org name
When I decided to register a domain name for my site and e-mail addresses, the term "Open Source" was used all over the media, with much of the focus on GNU/Linux. Being the silly person that I was, I decided to go with something along the line of "closed source". Unfortunately, the "closedsource.org" domain was already registered, so I used the common abbreviation of source, "src", and registered "closedsrc.org".
Keep in mind that the choice of the domain name implies that I have a bias against the Open Source movement and all of the projects, communities and volunteers. In reality, I advocate the use of and implement Open Source software wherever and whenever it makes sense. I believe that Open Source software provides the necessary environments to foster innovation and growth of all software, while provides additional choice of viable software.
I have also volunteered for and contributed to various communities, with most of my focus on the FreeBSD operating system.
Site Design and Foundation
This is the fourth major version of this web site, each version introduced not only major changes in the code that the site is based on but also in the design of the site.
The first version of the site was built to be very simplistic and lightweight (due to limited connectivity and hardware), in which the focus was specifically on content.
The second version of the site improved on the design, with significant influences from Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system and earlier versions of both Microsoft's MSDN and Python project web sites. While the code was fairly lightweight, but the design was overly restrictive and did not fare very well with older or mobile web browsers. That version was also my first venture into following both the HTML 4.01 and CSS specifications.
The third version of the site was a significant overhaul for both the code base and the focus on designing a site that strictly followed the XHTML and CSS2 specifications, as well as a site design that would be accessible by everyone.
Unfortunately, trying to extend both the code base and the design took more time than I had available. I also wanted a code base that provided content management and would be extensible by using extensions and allowed me to focus on a lot more on writing content than code.
All of that leads to the current version of the site, which uses the Drupal content management system as the code base, along with several additional modules and a modified theme. By using Drupal, I can now focus on writing content and make it easier to blog on a whim. With convenience comes at the expense of total control over the HTML or XHTML generated by the code, though maintaining a basic level of accessibility.
Behind the Scenes
The "server" that serves this web site is an HP/Compaq dc7700 desktop with a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive. The system is nice and small, while producing very little noise and heat, which replaced another small and relatively energy efficient Compaq iPaq desktop.
The system runs the FreeBSD operating system, with the web serving handled by Apache and PHP. The MySQL database backend is hosted on a separate system that has processing power to spare.