Adam Jarret Blog

Static web sites are awesome. They are fast, scale well, and are cheap to host. One unfortunate drawback is the necessity of using HTML to redirect to another URL.

However, this limitation can be overcome if the site is hosted on S3.

My trusty s3-publish module fell over when I last attempted to update my blog.

The error informed me that the maximum call stack size had been exceeded. In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why.

Fighting muscle memory is an uphill battle, especially when using a web app that replaces a native app.

After accidentally closing my active Cloud9 tab one too many times (while intending to close the active document) I decided to look for a way to save me from myself.

Luckily, it turned out to be surprisingly easy with macOS.

Having dead URLs in your sitemap.xml file is a surefire way to tank your website’s search rankings. The curl command can be used to check every <loc> element defined in the file to find any broken links.

This command was adapted from Analyzing XML Sitemap Files with Bash which goes into much greater detail.

The AMP Project provides tools and guidelines for webmasters interested in making sites that load quickly and are highly optimized for mobile devices. AMP-compatible sites are not allowed to employ custom JavaScript but predefined AMP components are provided by Google.

The <amp-twitter> component may be used to embed a specific tweet, but there is currently no built-in way to embed the “latest” tweet (or series of tweets) from a specific user.

The pain is amplified for static web sites that cannot rely on a server to dynamically generate markup on the fly. Nevertheless, it is possible for static web sites to dynamically display the latest content from Twitter. Here are three ways to accomplish it.

I recently received a somewhat dramatically worded e-mail from Google:

Googlebot identified a significant increase in the number of URLs on https://blog.atj.me/ that return a 404 (not found) error. This can be a sign of an outage or misconfiguration, which would be a bad user experience. This will result in Google dropping those URLs from the search results. If these URLs don’t exist at all, no action is necessary.

The search for the culprit led to a surprising realization. Googlebot apparently does not ignore markup in AMP <template> elements.

Let’s Encrypt is a service offering free SSL certificates that can be generated automatically with the certbot utility. These certs are perfect for developing with HTTPS.

By default, AWS Cloud9 uses Amazon Linux AMI for the backing EC2 instance which is not supported by the certbot utility. Fortunately, the Cloud9 environment comes pre-loaded with Docker and Let’s Encrypt provides official Docker images for certbot.

Because Cloud9 does not expose port 80, a DNS challenge must be used to verify ownership of the domain. Generated certificates can be used by a helper process (like http-server) running on the backing EC2 instance and/or they may be copied onto another machine.

The easiest and most convenient way to securely backup files using the command line is with the AWS CLI (see aws s3 docs). S3 buckets support versioning and default encryption (which causes uploaded files to be encrypted at rest). If you’re already managing your passwords with LastPass, you have another option for securely backing up misfit text files.

LastPass users who typically interact with their vault via a browser plugin may be surprised to learn of an official command line utility called lpass that provides access to secure items. See the man page for subcommands and details.

Using lpass, a text file (or any content piped from stdin) can be stored as a LastPass secure note. As with S3, LastPass secure notes are versioned and can be selectively shared.

Hugo beautifully facilitates the creation of static web sites that are cheap to host and trivial to scale. Historically, the trade-off with static blogs has been a clunkier process for publishing new articles. The days of simply hitting “save” in a web browser to update a blog post from anywhere went away for a little while, but AWS Cloud9 is bringing them back.

Cloud9 is a web based IDE that is perfectly suited to managing a Hugo blog in the cloud. The static site source files can reside on any server accessible via SSH, but Cloud9 really shines when backed by an EC2 instance that it manages on your behalf. Persistent files are stored on an EBS volume and the EC2 instance can be automatically stopped after a configurable period of inactivity.

The IDE provided by Cloud9 is surprisingly powerful, but I’m not ready to make it my daily driver for general programming tasks. That said, it makes an excellent interface for managing specific projects in the cloud (for convenience, collaboration, etc).

An AWS API Gateway proxy resource can be configured to respond to requests using a proxy integration to invoke a Lambda function.

From Set up a Proxy Integration with a Proxy Resource:

With this integration type, API Gateway applies a default mapping template to send the entire request to the Lambda function and transforms the output from the Lambda function to HTTP responses.

This makes it trivial to implement a redirection function for custom short URLs.