Bye-Bye Redirect

A month into using Tumblr for the blog and portfolio here, and I’m still happy I made the move. Something that had been bothering me was the redirect that was required for the homepage. I couldn’t point simplebits.com at Tumblr completely. If I had, over 10 years of files and old archives would’ve vanished. Setting up a subdomain avoids that, but I wanted the blog to be the main index of the site. So redirecting simplebits.com to stream.simplebits.com was the best I could do. A ProxyPass redirect might’ve solved the problem for “masking” the index—but Tumblr doesn’t support that.

I came up with a rather low-tech and sloppy solution for getting rid of the redirect that I thought I’d share in case any of you are in a similar boat. It’s sloppy, but it works well. Many thanks @frogandcode for helping with the scripty-ness.

Here’s how it works: I’m now running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file). And that’s it. The HTML source from my index on Tumblr works like a charm so long as I ensure all the paths to images and other files are absolute.

The other benefit here is that the homepage is now a flat .html file. It’s pretty damn snappy. The downside is that there’s a possibility of a post not appearing for 5 minutes after it’s published (unless you’re viewing stream.simplebits.com). But I can live with that until I’m posting breaking news. 

On moving work

Decided to simplify things and just start another Tumblr to handle the portfolio here. This enabled me to reuse the new theme with some slight tweaks, and begin my “different shade background for each section” thing. It’s far from comprehensive yet, as I still need to bring over some more of the old stuff.

It’s been interesting going through work that’s several years old. Much of it doesn’t exist anymore. Gone. Vanished. All that hard work, thinking, stressing… poof. It’s a nice reminder of what’s important, and the reality of the ever-evolving web. A lot of this junk is just temporary. 

Welcome to the bitstream

Like many others before me, I’ve moved the weblog portion of SimpleBits over here to Tumblr. I did this for many reasons. I like that there’s one f!@#$ing template. That’s it. I don’t miss comments. I don’t mind that archives aren’t styled the same way as the main theme. I’m actually excited about the subtle social aspects of Tumblr.

I don’t have time to customize another CMS. I used to love having the time to customize a CMS only to find a better one and customize that. I’m aiming for efficiency now. I enjoyed designing this theme. I don’t like that simplebits.com is a redirect to stream.simplebits.com.

I have 10 years of archives. I had fun adding responsiveness to this design. I need to reskin the shop. I need to add static pages for speaking and about sections. I need to figure out what I’m going to do with the portfolio. If I waited till everything was perfect I would’ve never launched this thing. I’m now ok with doing things in stages. I think the most important thing in all of this is that I’ll be able to post quickly, easily, with less effort.

I’m looking forward to telling you more once I finish the book I’ve been writing for the past few months.