Jason Leveille's Blog

It has been at least 3 months since I started coding this blog, and last Friday I finally deployed the thing. Those of you who read my blog likely know that this project was born from a graduate school independent study proposal. No good has ever come from a Friday afternoon deployment (at least for me), however my graduation was this past Saturday (Wo0t) and I had challenged myself to a pre-graduation launch. My primary motivation with this post is to enable and test comments in production. I want to see if things fall apart, and if my primitive spam detection holds up. So, feel free to leave a comment, good or bad.

My Original Goals

In general I met most of the goals associated with the project, though I definitely didn't meet them all. For example:

• I didn't create a lifestream and have yet to code anything against CouchDB
• I am NOT using nginx to serve static media files, though that is likely to change
• I am using Google Analytics instead of Mint
• I am not using 960gs
• I did not use Dojo ... which I may or may not go back to

Looking Back

It has been a busy semester for me. My original goal was to touch as many new technologies as I could. For example:

• I had never used PostgreSQL before
• I had never coded anything of substance in Python
• I had never used the Pylons web framework
• I had never hosted my own web application on my own web server
• I had never worked with Debian (Ubuntu doesn't count ;).

All of these things combined amounted to some really late nights, however I'm satisfied with the project in its current state. Over the year I will be adding additional features and enhancements, all of which can be seen at my Wurdig github repository.

Why the name Wurdig

Ralph Wurdig is my grandfather. He passed away in 2005 after a long battle with Cancer. It is an understatement to say that he was a great man. When I decided to start this project I wanted to give it a name, and Wurdig was the first thing that came to mind (and I now own www.wurdig.com, though I haven't done anything with it). In retrospect I'm very happy to have named the project after my grandfather. I have spent the last 3 months thinking about him as a result.