Technology Stir Fry, the blog

The 38th meeting of the REFEDS (Research and Education FEDerations) group took place this weekend. After Matte Miettinen had summarised the state of the Shibboleth Consortium, I gave a brief presentation updating everyone on the project’s technical status. You can download a PDF copy of the slides.

My podcast application of choice is Overcast by Marco Arment. He has just released Overcast 4.2, and the announcement is notable for its enlightened approach to user privacy:

Your personal data isn’t my business — it’s a liability. I want as little as possible. I don’t even log IP addresses anymore.

If I don’t need your email address, I really don’t want it.

…

And the first time you launch 4.2, people with email-based accounts will be encouraged to migrate them to anonymous accounts:

Of course it’s not possible for all applications to operate anonymously, but the principle is important: you should collect only as much personal information as you require and no more. Anything more than this is a GDPR concern and a data breach waiting to happen.

In one of the static web site projects I have been working on, the main text is composed using Markdown but a number of common constructs are used which Markdown can’t easily express. That’s not Markdown’s fault in any sense; I’m using it well outside its originally intended scope.

Here’s how I made things a bit simpler by using a Nanoc filter as a pseudo-extension for Markdown.

I have been writing here (or on the predecessor site) since 1996. That means that at the time of writing in 2018, some of that content is over twenty years old. If your reaction to that statement is “that’s plenty of time for something to break” then your instincts are perfectly sound.

It has been a month now since I finished my Nanoc conversion work, and it’s pretty obvious from the chart below that the performance improvements I expected from converting to a static site are real, and are here to stay.

The chart is from Google’s search crawler, so it doesn’t represent real human usage, but the dramatic lowering of the access times since the beginning of February is undeniable. Previously, if you got unlucky, you might have waited more than a second for even one of my pearls of wisdom. Now the most banal observations might be available in mere milliseconds.

I’ve been using rsync to build my site as a combination of a base layer held in git plus an overlay generated using Nanoc. Here’s how.

This site is going all-HTTPS, all the time. Read on for background and details.

[2018-03-11: HSTS implemented with max-age=1800, i.e., 30 minutes.]

[2018-04-16: HSTS implemented with max-age=31536000, i.e., one year.]

I have completed the migration work started back in December. As a result, this site is now entirely constructed using the Nanoc static-site generator, and the Drupal content management system has been retired.

If you’re reading this through a feed reader like Feedly, please drop me a line to let me know that the new feeds are working.

Continue reading for some thoughts on the process and on the results.

One thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time is move this site further towards the use of clean URLs. I am currently migrating to a static-site generator and that seemed like the ideal time. Here are a couple of tricks I’ve used to get clean URLs for my older content without breaking bookmarks.

I started using Drupal to manage most of this site a little under six years ago. That wasn’t a mistake — it solved the problems I wanted to solve at the time — but it hasn’t been an unqualified success either. It’s time to move on to the next thing, which for me looks like Nanoc, a static-site generator written in Ruby.