Que sera, sera

So, my free-ride at the expense of Incisive Media is coming to an end - I used to host all my sites on their network (and with 100 MBit/sec access, it was pretty speedy :-), but since I've moved out of the country, they've decided to go for a more-managed hosting solution. Unfortunately, that means they'll be moving out of the co-location facility that they (and therefore I) have been in for a few years. Goodbye Level-3, it was good while it lasted...

Of course, it wasn't just a free ride, I pretty much engineered their web infrastructure

• 
  
• a template-driven website engine (now with over 150 sites running on it, originally specced for 5)
  
• a comprehensive permissions system (subscribe to a magazine, or for a period, or for N views, or N free views then pay-to-view) at the heart of the template engine.
  
• the database behind it all, tying everything together
  
• an XML-RPC interface to the various components in the system
  
• various feed systems (XML, FTP, SOAP) that could be generated and maintained by Incisive
  
• a payments management solution,
  
• back-end integration into their publishing systems,
  
• a message-board system
  
• a bulk-emailer with graphical (non-technical :-) reports
  
• a jobs-indexing system for Incisive's advertisers, allowing the advertisers to control the look and feel within an incisive-provided template.
  
• a full-text search index (I tried the MySQL one, but it was way too slow, mine can do queries over a million pages in ~1/10th of a second, orders of magnitude faster than MySQL on the same hardware)
  
• integration of search into other components (eg: mail-merge, the editor does a search, and these form most of the body of the templated email, together with his comments intermingled in the prose)
  
• dynamic templating, so search results can be presented differently on different sites (for example)
  
• PHP modules, evaluated inline to provide dynamic content (this is how the different search results was done :-)
  
• a back-end management system that presented different interfaces depending on the technical level of the user (as decided by Incisive :-)
  
• a dynamic firewall - if the webserver didn't like its input, it could add the current IP address to the list of those blocked by the machine's firewall. Since it was machine-generated, it stored a reason why the firewalling had happened as well, which came in handy when irate businessmen 'phoned up to ask why they couldn't see the site [grin]
  

One of the things I'm reasonably proud of is that the system was both modular and scalable - it started off as a simple templating system, and grew, (and grew...), but because I kept providing general-case solutions to specific problems, it scaled really well - to this day you can go to (eg: risknews.net, view the source, scroll down, and see the stats for the page in a comment at the bottom :-)