Tangible Bytes

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It is a simple blog and does not need to

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While there could be some benefits to me in seeing which parts of the site are more popular at this time I think the GDPR is essentially a good law which provides important freedoms.

It is right that people should only be tracked with their consent.

That said cookie popups are very annoying and I believe that the value of analytics is less than the costs of annoying people and so have decided not to track users on this site.

I wanted to use an html <aside> block in my blog and this isn’t supported by Markdown

It’s fairly easy to implement as a hugo shortcode though

I created a file (path from the root of my hugo site)

layouts/shortcodes/aside.html

I’ve really enjoyed learning Golang lately, the tour is a great place to start and I found using VSCode as an IDE really helped with automatic formatting and highlighting of errors.

Best things about Go so far for me are

I’ve been writing software for long enough to know that it pays to be careful at the start. You don’t always know when you’ll be supporting a project long term and may need to upgrade versions of your framework and related tools.

These are my notes of starting to use React with an eye to long term support.

Sean Burlington

Over 20 years professional experience of website and infrastructure development with clients in a wide variety of settings including government, business, and charity.

Experience working with major brands such as Intel, The Home Office, and The Ramblers - as well as many small organisations.

Broad and deep skillset as a full stack developer, and experienced systems administrator (DevOps).

Capable of working on most parts of a system from database to API code to JavaScript and CSS - I am not a designer but have a strong awareness of how design, brand identity, and business goals impact on a project - while UX and accessibility are cornerstones of delivery.

As more and more of the web moves to https, we developers find more problems getting things to run properly.

It used to be easier to run development sites on http and maybe have a config option pretending it was secure, or use a fake certificate (often labelled “snakeoil”)

As the internet has matured this has become more problematic.

Some things just don’t work without https, browsers are less likely to let you ignore the warning, and if you develop a PWA it just won’t work without a valid, trusted certificate.

I have a client who need to spin up webservers on demand to quickly test code and content, they use Docker to host these sites.

Currently they expose each site an a different port - which needs to be configured both within the container so that it can perform appropriate redirects, and by the user needing to get to the right site.

I’m automating the spin up process and wanted to make this a bit smoother.

I like to use wildcard DNS for ephemeral servers such as these.

A wildcard DNS record is a record in a DNS zone that will match requests for non-existent domain names.

A wildcard DNS record is specified by using a * as the leftmost label (part) of a domain name, e.g. *.example.com.

wikipedia

I just point this address at my Docker server and then any name like website1.testsites.example.com will resolve to my docker host.

You should try to find some internet connection to browse here.