Shortening My URLs With tekdmn.me

Has anyone noticed that I’ve been giving out URLs of the form tekdmn.me and not teknikaldomain.me? Well, not only did I buy another domain that’s just a shorter version of this one, but it’s also, at the moment, the singular domain I have that’s 100% serverless. How? Cloudflare, obviously.

Using Cloudflare's HTTP/2 Server Push

For those unaware, when using Cloudflare to proxy your site, HTTP/2 support is usually on by default, and highly recommended, and you can also enable HTTP/3 too. But, for a while I thought that Cloudflare’s HTTP/2 would rob you of one of the really cool and touted features of HTTP/2: the server push. Well, as it turns out, that’s completely possible. Let’s dive in.

Teknikaldomain.me Website Architecture Overview

So I just checked in with initialcommit.com, the website run by Jacob Stopak, the same person I collaborated with to help explain the internals of version control systems, not once, but twice even. And he published an overview of how he made the site, and what tools he used. As I was looking, I noticed, we took a very different approach to get to two similar endpoints.

If you just want to see what I did, read on. If you want to see the differences, or are just curious about the various ways that sites can be built, read his first, then come back with that knowledge in mind.

Regaining Hugo Image Processing

So as of now, there’s about half as many LFS objects in this blog’s repository, the page size has fallen by, well, not exactly a rock, but by a noticeable amount, and as of now, all my images are around the same size again. So what gives?

Well like the trend is on this site, I offloaded some responsibility to something else. And by something, I once again mean Cloudflare. This time, not workers, but a feature standard with the Pro plan that I switched to a bit ago.

Upgrading to a Cloudflare Pro Plan

So as of yesterday, the Cloudflare plan on this site has changed from free to pro, the second of four, and the cheapest paid plain that they have. Really, there’s not that much that you will see, but there’s plenty of backend changes that I’m going to be using with this. And I’m going to break down what the actual changes are.

Configuring Cloudflare's Cache, and Cache-Control Headers

I’ve talked enough about Cloudflare caching that I’m not going to do introduce it again. This time though, we’re going in depth just a bit more, going over what’s cached, default cache times, and… more headers.

Improving My Site With Cloudflare Workers and Amazon S3

So as of now, anything much more over 1 MB I’m not going to take up space on all my devices hosting — I’ll just offload it to someone else. And how do I get it back? JavaScript.

No wait, I’m actually serious. As of now, I essentially have Cloudflare as a CDN that’s backed by the Amazon S3 storage service. Posts such as the one about light balance have everything but the featured image… not here anymore.

Adventures in HAProxy

For those of you that do not know, HAProxy is an amazing piece of kit that can proxy HTTP and arbitrary TCP connections. It’s also so customizable that I’m practically using it as my main entry point to my network, and do indeed refer to it internally as the “border gateway.” With two exceptions (SSH and SMTP, more on that later), everything that comes into the TD-StorageBay network, yes, that includes this site too, passes through that one process. However, HA cannot do everything… and I feel that I’m pushing its limits. Not in the “sheer workload” sense, no, I am way far off from that. I mean in the old Mythbusters style “using things in ways for which they were never intended” manner.