samhuri.net

This blog is statically generated. A few Ruby and Node.js scripts along with a Makefile and some duct tape hold it all together. All of samhuri.net is on Github if you want to take a look. Most of it is quite minimal, sometimes to a fault. Little improvements are made here and there and the most recent one is a neat .htaccess hack. I want to automatically announce new posts on Twitter so short URLs are in order.

I try to strike a reasonable balance between writing everything for this site myself and using libraries. A quick look at a few short URL projects was enough to see they weren't what I was looking for. They were all database backed servers. Comments on this blog are served up dynamically but everything else is static and I try to avoid dynamic behaviour when possible. Comments are moving to a more static system sometime. Anyway I registered the domain s42.ca and nabbed an algorithm for creating the short codes from Jonathan Snook before diving into TextMate to implement my idea.

The result is about two dozen additional lines of Ruby in my static generator, and a command added to a Makefile. The Ruby code generates a short URL for each of my blog posts and then creates a RewriteRule directive to redirect that short codes to each corresponding blog post. Then the directives are dumped into a .htaccess file which is scp'd to s42.ca when I run make publish_blog.

I think this is a pretty neat hack and have not seen this technique anywhere else so I thought I'd share it. Maybe someone else will find it interesting or useful for their blog. How far it scales won't be a concern until I have thousands of posts. That sounds like a good problem for future Sami to solve should it arise.