Whats this for?
This page is just a summary of what's new in version 4.0. If you're more after what the premise of the site is and what all the content on here is about, you're in the wrong place. You want to go to the about page.

What People Are Saying About Impetus 4.0

This site still exists?
-Everyone

A little bit of history.
Originally, this site started out under my bed. Literally.

It used to run on an old beater Dell desktop, I believe a pentium 200, running the OpenBSD operating system. It was hosted over my meager cable internet connection, and, actually, ran quite well considering. The site wasn't very high traffic (still isn't) so a super fast connection wasn't very necessary.

Somewhere along the way, Will, the other half of reifier.org, stumbled on the opportunity to throw a server on a decent line for a ridiculously cheap price. So a cheap Sparc64 box was bought off of eBay, shipped out to California, and plugged into a high speed connection. This server was also a bit of a beater, but was much better than the old Dell under my bed. It too ran OpenBSD, and was for a long time, the home of reifier.org.

A few years passed, we changed location a few times, and reifier.org chugged away on this box for a while.

Then, sometime in September 07, we were notified that the cost of keeping our server online was going to double, so we again sought a new place to be our home. Will also took this opportunity to finally switch out the old server for something new, and a new fancy, non-beater box was purchased. He slapped Debian on it and found it a home in Marlborough, MA and everything seems to be running splendidly.

At that time I rewrote the site from scratch, mostly focusing on refactoring the database, as well as taking advantage of classes in PHP. That was 3.0, and it was a pretty major overhaul. It was also a pretty decent version, as it seems that doing this latest rewrite was extremely painless.

In Octoboer 2010, I decided it was time to learn something knew so I started over once more, this time in a completely knew language: Python.

It's come a long way from desktop under my bed, no?

What makes this a brand new "version"?
This site changes quite a bit.

Typically, additions to the site are done on the fly, and simply tacked on to what's already here, much like other sites on the web. This site however, is used largely as a learning playground for me to run free and develop my coding abilities. So, a lot of the design and layout of this site is, frankly, not great, as a large portion of it was made when I simply didn't have much coding experience. This, paired with the sort of incremental development that happens here turns the site into a sort of unruly beast after some time. Things just get messy and disorganized, and therefore harder to maintain, until everything reaches a critical mass where I simply can't take it anymore and I decide it's time to start from scratch.

This, then, is the start from scratch. For the 4th time.

Changes Behind The Scenes
This is where this page gets technical.

This is almost a true rewrite since I completely changed languages. The site used to be written in PHP, and I, like many others, have since learned better. This time around the site is done in Python, leveraging the really quite nice framework of Pylons.

Pylons uses a couple of core technologies that the site therefore leverages. For the front end, theres a templating language called Mako, which lets me re-use a lot of the HTML components in a much slicker way than PHP did. On the back end, while there aren't any structural database changes, I've started using SQLAlchemy to abstract away the details of querying. This might actually slow things down for a bit until I tweak it, but it makes my life much easier in terms of code management.

The last bit is that I've started using jQuery for all javascript functionality, something I should have done the last time I went through this.

Noticable Changes
This time round there's not much changed that you should see.

1. Better CSS
Again, througout the site, I've tried to employ a better use of the stylesheets, so that should I decide to change the visual style of everything I can do so quickly.

2. Better html in general
Even fewer tables, even more divs, even less code.

3. Slight appearance tweaks
For the most part the visual style will remain the same, but with a few tweaks here and there.