---
title: About the site
description: site info, tools used to build the site
tags: site-info, general
creation-date: 2014-09-14
last-major-revision-date: 2015-01-14
license: CC0
aliases: about-this-site, site
---

*This page is about this site; for information about myself, see [About me]().*

# Philosophy

This site is my attempt to realize [gwern]’s idea of [Long
Content]()---i.e. the goal is to incrementally update the pages so as to
produce useful, lasting content.[^cy] In particular, I strive to make
all the source files used to produce this site human-readable (by
writing pages in [Pandoc] markdown), version-controlled (with git), and
freely-licensed (all pages are at least [CC-BY], with some in the public
domain[^copy]; the [software used to make this site](#colophon) is all
free software).  I also like to [release early, release often][rero]; I
actually don't deploy the site as often, but I try to commit to the git
repository often---so my site is the result of many incremental updates.

[gwern]: http://gwern.net
[cc-by]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
[pandoc]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
[rero]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often

[^cy]: Of course, more cynically, [one could quote Scott Alexander](https://web.archive.org/web/20130118212124/http://raikoth.net/) about the reason many people have personal websites:

    > You know how if you're under the age of thirty you have to have a
    > personal webpage with your name, your photo, your resume, and then
    > a link to your blog or something like that?
    >
    > Well, this is mine. Plus a little extra.

    In this case, this site would just be my attempt to "be cool",
    instead of serving useful content.

[^copy]: So content will be copied, making the data safe.

Inspired by [Vipul Naik](http://vipulnaik.com), I am also experimenting with the [tree structure](./using-a-tree-structure-for-websites) of this site.


# Colophon

Here are the tools used to build and run this site.

Most pages are written using [Vim](http://www.vim.org/) using the [Pandoc markdown syntax](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html#pandocs-markdown).
For each page that was manually written, the source markdown file can be accessed by clicking “page source” at the top of that page.
The markdown files are then compiled to HTML using a static site generator I wrote, which is stored in [`generator.py`](https://github.com/riceissa/riceissa.com/blob/master/generator.py) in the repository[^ssglist].

The [style sheet for this site](https://github.com/riceissa/issarice.com/blob/master/css/minimal.scss) is written in [SASS](http://sass-lang.com/) and compiled to CSS.
It uses [Ethan Schoonover](http://ethanschoonover.com/)’s light [solarized theme](http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized) (for code colors) as well as small ideas from various places like [Gwern’s site](http://www.gwern.net/About#tools), GitHub’s (old) documentation pages, and the [gitit] CSS.

[gitit]: http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/

All of the source files necessary to build this site are hosted on GitHub.
You can [visit the repository](https://github.com/riceissa/riceissa.com) by clicking “website source” at the top of any page.
I also have a [mirror on BitBucket](https://bitbucket.org/riceissa/issarice.com/).

The actual site is served via [Linode](https://www.linode.com/), using Apache 2 on a 64-bit Debian 7 (Wheezy) machine.
I currently use the [Linode 1GB \$10 per month plan](https://www.linode.com/pricing).

I have registered the domains [issarice.com](http://issarice.com) and [riceissa.com](http://riceissa.com) through [Hover](https://www.hover.com/).

[^ssglist]: Although the static site generator I wrote is freely licensed, I don't recommend that others use it (at least for now); it is somewhat of a hack that I put together to get some features I wanted working (but found lacking in other static site generators).
Instead, one can find a list of many static site generators [here](http://staticsitegenerators.net/).

# Getting updates

I have an [RSS feed](http://issarice.com/feed.xml) for this site.
For more ways to get updates, see [Feed]().

# Belief and status tags

I use [status tags]() and [belief tags]() on this site, both of which
are ideas I got from gwern's site. These are both meant to tell the
reader how the author regards the content on a page. I find that it's
mostly useful in cases where I want to say "I've only briefly thought
about this topic, and haven't really spent much effort working on this
page, so even though I think it's worth making public, you shouldn't
take this page very seriously, nor should you think that I believe the
things I'm writing"---but don't want to keep repeating that all the time
(so I just tag these pages with "*Status: notes; belief: possible*" or
something).