3 ms·

I admire the neat design and a backend of (quoting your site) "the server". Have you written an article about this?

• pjc50 7y ago
  Oh, it's been years since I was involved with any of the actual running of it. I don't even have a shell account any more. In the early days it was "the server", a spare PC that was donated. These days it looks like they have a donated cluster: https://www.srcf.net/faq/about#system https://www.srcf.net/faq/about#system The "backend" will be Apache. On day 1 we used SSI (server-side includes) for "theming" pages, which were all in handwritten HTML. I suspect it's still like that given the five blank lines before DOCTYPE. It looks like some bootstrap CSS has been sprinkled on it since then. There's no front-end Javascript because there doesn't need to be. > Until 2006 we had just one server in use, kern (a dual Athlon 1.6GHz PC with 2GB of RAM and 400GB of disk). Before that we used to run on an ancient Intel Pentium running at 166MHz with 128MB of RAM. How times have changed :) Indeed. That ancient system was perfectly adequate for serving web pages to a few thousand people for light use. At the time I was carrying around the amazing new thing that was a computer you could fit in your pocket and play music illegally downloaded from the internet on. It was a Toshiba Libretto 30 with 8MB (eight megabytes) of RAM and a PCMCIA sound card. Our systems approach to the SRCF was very much "what is the simplest thing that could possibly work". Apache+CGI+PHP with UNIX user accounts will get you a long way if you let it. The real achievement is political and personal. I'm amazed that they've always managed to find good enough volunteer staff for the whole thing for twenty years.