aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/root
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authors-ol <s-ol@users.noreply.github.com>2019-10-26 19:36:20 +0000
committers-ol <s-ol@users.noreply.github.com>2019-10-26 19:36:25 +0000
commit5ea749e312282f6da37d8d748b031b3b211f8e8b (patch)
tree33320845a38d6cc7f17f9ba40ce94cddd611671f /root
parentMerge branch 'portfolio' (diff)
downloadmmm-5ea749e312282f6da37d8d748b031b3b211f8e8b.tar.gz
mmm-5ea749e312282f6da37d8d748b031b3b211f8e8b.zip
add why_redirectly blog post
Diffstat (limited to 'root')
-rw-r--r--root/blog/why_redirectly/categories: text$plain1
-rw-r--r--root/blog/why_redirectly/date: time$iso8601-date1
-rw-r--r--root/blog/why_redirectly/text$markdown.md51
-rw-r--r--root/blog/why_redirectly/title: text$plain1
4 files changed, 54 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/root/blog/why_redirectly/categories: text$plain b/root/blog/why_redirectly/categories: text$plain
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..18e1a49
--- /dev/null
+++ b/root/blog/why_redirectly/categories: text$plain
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+update programming devops
diff --git a/root/blog/why_redirectly/date: time$iso8601-date b/root/blog/why_redirectly/date: time$iso8601-date
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bf5faec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/root/blog/why_redirectly/date: time$iso8601-date
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+2019-10-26
diff --git a/root/blog/why_redirectly/text$markdown.md b/root/blog/why_redirectly/text$markdown.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4157a0a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/root/blog/why_redirectly/text$markdown.md
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+# Why I'm running a personal URL shortening service
+This blog you are reading at the moment is currently running it's third reincarnation.
+Originally, it was a Jekyll blog hosted on github pages,
+before I moved to my own web platform.
+That platform is currently undergoing its second big rewrite.
+
+Even while still running on github pages,
+the blog moved from https://s0lll0s.github.io, to https://s0lll0s.me and finally to https://s-ol.nu.
+Once arrived at https://s-ol.nu, I had to move the blog posts to a different route (`/blog` vs just living in the root)
+at some point, to make space for other routes.
+Then with my custom platform everything changed again,
+since now my main system is actually located at https://mmm.s-ol.nu.
+
+As you might imagine, at every change all the old URLs stop working.
+Noone likes finding dead links, but if you post links on social media
+it is often extremely unwieldy or impossible to update all the posts.
+
+If you run your own website or blog ([maybe][sir] you [should][indie]?),
+your site may have gone throug similar transitions,
+or maybe it is about to go through one -
+or perhaps you are deferring making a change because you worry about this?
+
+To partially solve this issue, I built a tiny URL redirection service, [redirectly][redirectly].
+It works much the same as those URL shortening services you may have used before (bit.ly, tinyurl etc.),
+except that I manually specify the shortened URLs in a file (in the git repo).
+
+Nowadays, when I post a link to some content on my website (such as this blog post),
+I first allocate a new `slug` (shortlink) and set it up in `redirectly`.
+Then I use the shortened link, such as https://s-ol.nu/why-redirectly in this case,
+instead of directly linking to the content.
+
+This way, whenever I make changes to my content's adressing scheme,
+I simply change the URL location, and any old links that are floating around remain functional.
+Should I ever change to another domain, I will consider simply leaving the redirection service running on this domain anyhow,
+to keep old links alive. At least for a few years :)
+
+Of course all of this doesn't work when visitors of my page navigate around by themselves,
+and then share the URL from their address bar.
+This could be solved by using the JS [history API][history] by overriding the displayed URL with the permalink whenever one exists,
+but I haven't tried implementing this type of bi-directional querying yet.
+
+I am also aware that running Clojure (and therefore a JVM) is not necessarily
+the best choice for a service that is so light,
+but I wrote `redirectly` as a little experiment while learning Clojure,
+and it is such a simple project that if it ever bugs me I can just throw it out and implement it in something else.
+
+[sir]: https://drewdevault.com/make-a-blog
+[indie]: https://indieweb.org/why
+
+[redirectly]: https://s-ol.nu/redirectly/src
+[history]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API
diff --git a/root/blog/why_redirectly/title: text$plain b/root/blog/why_redirectly/title: text$plain
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..63c6ff7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/root/blog/why_redirectly/title: text$plain
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Why I'm running a personal URL shortening service