A bit of background or why I developed DO3

Some time back I was interested in WordPress. I liked it a lot and felt the best way of learning more about it was to write my own template. This is how Drikatruu Jelly got started. If you wonder about the strange name, it's explained on the about page of that site.

After a while my interests changed, but my template had started a life of its own and people continued to use it. My interests then really changed and I had no more time to maintain my WordPress template. This is where the problem started. The site might be static, but the underlying technology keeps changing.

WordPress needs to be updated every couple of months. Then your host wants to change something with the server OS, Apache, PHP or MySQL - all of that has the potential to affect your website. Time consuming indeed and not where my interests are.

This is how I became interested in App Engine. The promise of having all of the work on the underlying components of my site being looked after by the smart folks of Google sounded sweet. So I wanted to know more. Why not build another template, which I could then use with later sites? And so came Drikatruu Omega3 about.

What a silly name for a template...

Omega3? Well, I just finished Michael Pollan's excellent book In Defense of Food and since I finished my eating habits have changed slightly. 'Jelly' was a name inspired by my daughter, 'Omega3' was inspired by Pollan's boook - it's the only nutrient Michael Pollan adds to his diet. Omega3 should be all you need to get started with a little static website on Google's App Engine. Yes, and I do like strange names.

About myself

My name is Thomas Natter and I live and work in Bangkok, Thailand. I am not a programmer, but like to hang out with people who are. Most of them have little respect for PHP as a computer language and while I love it for its ease of use and its excellent documentation, I eventually had to look at Python, since that' s what App Engine understands. There was no Java when I started, which is not to say that it would be useful for a website template, but it is now possible to stack PHP on top of Java on App Engine. But I am happy I did check out Python: I really like the syntax and the development environment it comes with. I still think PHP is a very useful language for the kind of things I do, but I found Python to be even better. DO3 is using Python. Basic Python I should add.

I had fun developing Drikatruu Omega3, I hope you find it useful. I can be reached at th.natter[at]gmail.com.

Documentation