I would be remiss in not thanking the Varnish cache developers, too: it's using CloudFront now but Varnish came in quite handy when we suddenly jumped from mostly images to some large videos like http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/21... shortly after launch.

The scariest bit of code was probably the scraper + html5lib normalizer I used to migrate something like 15 years of legacy static HTML content from two separate into the CMS using a large pile of selectors and cleanup heuristics.

http://chris.improbable.org/2009/10/16/deploying-django-site... describes how the site was packaged using RPM so we could fit within the more traditional IT model used by the production sysadmins.

One open-source tool which came out of this was https://github.com/shentonfreude/webcompare which we used to bulk-compare the old and new sites to confirm that all of our legacy URLs either redirected or were intentionally 404/410ed.

Thanks for speaking up! FWIW, you did most of the work for the migration and rebuild. I apologize for not naming you when most of this was your work. :-)

No apology necessary - I find it feels weird to name people unless they're already part of the conversation.

This doesn't strike me as bragging at all. I always appreciate the chance to connect people with projects.

I have learned from some of your posts about developing with Django, so I took a second look at the site after realizing you had helped build it.

To some this might come off as simple bragging, but I can relate to the sense of accomplishment (and appreciate the little insight into the tech stack).

Well, to be honest, acdha did most of the work for this project. At the time I was stuck being yanked back and forth between several projects per day.

Why not replace the flash banner with an animated .gif?

Because the designer who insisted on the flash banner wanted to use flash. :P