A dive into serving brotli compressed assets

Addy Osmani’s talk about performance at the last FFConf had a small segment on serving brotli compressed assets, as opposed to gzip. The claims are that brotli produces smaller filesizes than gzip, so if you want to squeeze some extra performance out of your site, then just switch over and reap those rewards! The talk, however, was light on the implementation details. Well, I decided to take a look to see how easy the switch would be.

Local HTTPS

I’m not going to extol the virtues of encrypting your site and enabling HTTP/2. The advantages should be pretty obvious by now. The real issue is that when you’ve got your site(s) and your clients’ site(s) encrypted, you’re left with local development versions of the sites which are now at odds with the live version. And it’s always best to mirror your dev and live environments as much as possible to avoid those last-minute deployment panics.

Using NPM as a Build Tool

A year or so ago, I came across this post by Keith Cirkel, How to Use npm as a Build Tool and it stuck with me. At the time I was transitioning to gulp from grunt both personally and for Clearleft projects. We had a discussion about the feasability of going full NPM and decided that using gulp was still the best for us. There are plenty of great reasons to use grunt or gulp and we will continue to do so at Clearleft, but for my personal site I decided to experiment with pure NPM.

Games of Shame

Some time around the last Steam sale I knew I couldn’t keep buying games I never intend to play. Or, at least, do not have time for. If I cared about the game, I would have bought it sooner, really. Instead, all I could feel was the burden of games unfinished. The list of which was ever growing. So I decided to make a literal list of those unfinished games and try to beat them before moving on.

The Proposal

Some of you may know that several weeks ago I got engaged to my amazing girlfriend. However, I am not the type of person who does things… traditionally. Proposals are infrequent but special events, not unlike weddings themselves, and I wanted to treat it as such. But not boring special. Anyone can go to a fancy restaurant and have their beloved find a ring in the bottom of a glass of champagne.

Installing Letsencrypt on Ubuntu 14.04 and nginx

Here at the Clearleft towers we use DigitalOcean and our servers run Ubuntu 14.04 and Nginx 1.8.0. At the moment, Letsencrypt has an auto installer for Apache only. I actually have no idea what that does, as the other option is to create the certificate files and link to them in your site’s conf file manually, which is all I’ve ever done anyway. I don’t think I’d want anything doing that step for me.

Scraping Twitter Feeds with NodeJS

Well, the time finally came. I had been using Remy Sharp’s handy little twitter.js script to show one tweet on the homepage of my latest live site, Pulse, and Twitter’s API changes finally caught up with it. Now, I’m not the sharpest cookie in the drawer (see?) so wrapping my head round Twitter’s OAuth system in a short time is actually beyond me. Embedding a tweet with all of Twitter’s forced styling is out of the question, really.

Setting up a FreeNAS server

Intro The Hardware Installing FreeNAS Configuring Conclusion Intro I’d planned on setting up a Fileserver/NAS for quite a while now. Who hasn’t? I even bought all the hardware over a year ago. But, for whatever reason, I’d felt that it would take forever to sort out and put it off time and time again. I also wanted whatever solution I came up with to be perfect. While that’s pretty tricky when dealing with the rapidly evolving tech industry, you actually don’t want to be messing around with a system holding 5TB of data.

Occasional Git

Welcome to Occasional Git! For when you’re working on your own, on small-ish sites. These are the things I encounter sometimes only once a month, if that. I’ll be supplementing the commands with examples I’ve used personally. Ignoring files already committed git rm --cached I’m horrendous at knowing what files to ignore until much later. So this little command is definitely the highest on the list of “how do I do that again?

The Case of the Linux Box and nginx

Following on from the last post which laid the landscape covering the whys, we now get on to the hows. The server I’ve been with MediaTemple for many years, first with their (dv) servers for client work, then their (gs) servers for my personal sites. I’ve never had a problem with them in all that time. Their customer service is impeccable, their knowledgebase is a treasure trove of information, and the user forums have pointed me in the right direction more times than I care to count.