Site Technology

For the technically inclined and curious among our readers, here is some information about the technology behind LiteracyTent.

Most of the web pages on LiteracyTent are built by hand. The present architecture of the majority of the site is a template-based system of static pages, rebuilt when changes warrant. It's a custom process designed for maximum efficiency, and we're quite pleased with it (and are frequently tweaking it).

The pages themselves (with the exception of external systems we've integrated, like the Mailman mailing list system), are done in XHTML 1.1 and coded to the strictest standards. We do not use tables for layout, all layout is done with stylesheets.

We host our own server equipment at a very good colocation facility with outstanding physical security, generator backups, and redundant T3 lines coming right into the room. The service is exceptionally reliable. The East Coast network outages and the blackout of 2003 didn't affect us all.

We run heavily-tweaked Red Hat Linux systems, on servers from California Digital. We use the Apache web server, the MySQL database environment, and gobs of Perl and mod_perl for server management and actual site code. There's Python and PHP running on the server as well. We use the Mailman mailing list system for our mailing lists. We use QMail and Courier for our mail servers, SquirrelMail for webmail, SpamAssassin for handling spam, and ClamAV for virus protection.