about carriagereturn.org
carriagereturn.org is a collection of principles, practices, quotes and heuristics about the craft of software engineering (computer programming). It is things I want to know and keep in mind when I write software.
Genesis
This site started as my collection of information about software engineering gathered on a personal Wiki. It grew and grew, and I found I rarely had (or made) time to refer to it.
More and more I found myself relying on web feeds for most of my information. In April 2006 I started playing with Django, the Python web framework. It makes it very easy to build websites, and to publish feeds. The obvious solution was to split up the Wiki into bite sized chunks, and have a site feed them to me daily.
Having lost the organisational power of a Wiki, the question was how to organise the content. Never being one to be left behind by software fashion, it had to be tags.
Each entry consists of a bunch of tags, the content of the entry, and optionally the name of the person who inspired, or wrote, the content. Often the content is me para-phrasing / digesting what has been said in a newsgroup or article by someone wiser.
The person listed as inspiration in the entry is in no way otherwise associated with this site, and most likely does not know about it. Hopefully they are flattered. Otherwise, please let me know and I will remove your words and name from carriagereturn.org.
Technology
This site is built in Python using the most excellent Django framework. It was developed using the Eclipse IDE with the PyDev extension and verified with pylint. It runs on the Apache httpd server. The database is MySQL. The site is hosted on a Linode virtual server. The operating system on my development box and on the server is Ubuntu Linux.
If you are interested in using the carriagereturn application for your own uses, or simply want to look at the code, please contact me. I would release it under the GPL license, but I don't think anyone is interested.
Contact / Feedback
You love it, you hate it, you want the code, you want it turned off ? Write to me:graham@carriagereturn.org