Nicholas Lindley

I’ve made a few under-the-hood changes to the site and thought you might like a quick update. The biggest change is switching to TLS. In addition to TLS, Web fonts have been removed, hosting is now done from a VPS and not a CDN, and a couple of CSS issues got cleaned up.

The switch to TLS was made because I kept reading that I should. Also, I’ve been thinking about playing around with Service Workers which require HTTPS. Hopefully your RSS readers don’t get tripped up.

Because I wanted a custom certificate and there don’t seem to be affordable options for secure CDN hosting, I switched to a trusty VPS. Having a dedicated IP means I can be friendlier to older clients that don’t support SNI. It’s actually quite nice running a traditional server again where things like serving up an index file for directories are handled pretty easily out of the box. It will also give me the flexibility in the future if there are dynamic bits I want to add to the site.

I’ve been thinking about removing Web fonts for a while. The typography does not look as nice, but the site sure feels snappy now. The main page is around 15 kB of HTML and 5 kB of CSS, both uncompressed. With no other changes, I’ve reduced the amount of data transferred by about 95%. Really, rethink those Web fonts. While we’re at it, let’s rethink all of those images and scripts and style sheets.

The last thing I did was set up Codeship to deploy my site automatically. After you’ve hooked up your repository, you’ll need to copy the SSH public key under the project’s general settings into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for the user that will be doing the deploying. Since I’m using Jekyll, the following commands did the trick.

# Setup Commands
bundle install
# Custom Deployment Script
bundle exec jekyll build
rsync -avz -e "ssh" _site/ user@host:path/to/site/

Be careful with the trailing slashes in rsync—they can be tricky.

Finally, if you remember Day 51, I cleaned up a couple of the quicker CSS issues noted there. Eventually the others will be cleaned up as well.