– Who is Samuel Pepys and why a weblog is a natural fit for this site

– John Carmack had daily write ups in the mid-1990s

– It gets about 150,000+ page views a month with 30,000+ users

– The site is more than just weblog entries, there’s 88k+ user comments

– It’s the sweet spot of engagement between popular but not crazy popular

– Motivation for using Django and Python after using Movable Type for 9 years

– Deadlines are a great way to ensure you abort the idea of perfect and release it

– Django was enjoyable to use, and Phil thought about using Rails and PHP too

– We live in a really nice time where we have so many good choices for web frameworks

– It’s a monolithic app with about 12,000 lines of Python across 200 files

– It’s split into a bunch of Django apps, here’s a few

– The idea of using apps to organize your code is a great idea

– This whole site is open source on GitHub, you can use it as a learning resource

– How new entries make their way onto the site (spoiler alert: it was laborious)

– The site uses server rendered Django templates with sprinkles of JavaScript

– Tiny bit of JS for things like maps (Leaflet) and charts (D3.js)

– Server rendered templates are simple and fast, it’s a great combo

– It runs on Heroku with PostgreSQL and a bit of caching with Redis

– The site runs on (1) $7 / month “Hobby” Dyno and it’s more than enough

– There’s full text search using Django’s built in PostgreSQL search features

– Django 3.0 powers the site as of today and Phil likes to keep it up to date

– If you postpone updating your dependencies for too long it can get painful

– What are you caching? Everything! At least for anonymous users

– The PostgreSQL database runs off the $9 / month Heroku add-on

– Have you ever thought about spinning up your own server?

– If you don’t like the idea of managing your own servers, Heroku can be decent

– Heroku handles issuing SSL certificates for you for free

– Sentry is used for error handling through the Heroku add-on

– Errors coming in are pretty rare

– Phil’s site holds its own in terms of SEO, even against Wikipedia

– Heroku handles backing up the database once a day, and Phil backs it up to S3 too

– He also uses S3 to store some of the static files, such as uploaded blog post images

– Django storage is used to handle uploading to S3

– Best tips? Start simple and grow it from there, writing any code is important

– Maybe using an app generator isn’t worth it, unless you make a lot of new apps

– You can find Phil on Twitter, he also has his own site at https://www.gyford.com/