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.