About the Site

The site consists of a document store written in Mnesia, a serving layer provided by inets httpd, a presentation layer which leverages Nitrogen, and an editing interface which leverages TinyMCE.  (CouchDB looked like a good choice for the document store, but I am super familiar with Mnesia so that was very easy for me to get going).

The application style portions of the site are implemented via Nitrogen.  The comment system utilizes postbacks which update the Mnesia store.  The CMS capabilities of the site are only available if you authenticate as myself.  Essentially I made a Nitrogen element out of the TinyMCE editor and I use this to modify the content in a WYSIWYG style.  Here's a picture of me editing this page:

TinyMCE is very cool.

The rss feed and recently updated features are implemented with a separate ordered_set Mnesia table with a timestamp as a key.  I use on disk ordered_set via tcerl.  When I make changes it sets a flag which causes Mnesia to backup to S3 at the next interval.  I use s3fs to make that easy.