Of course the Plays page which I was touting last week failed miserably. It complains about the base setting being incorrect. I suppose it’s telling the truth, but it’s a bit annoying to find these things out in production. So I’ve deployed a new version and due to the CDN, you might see that new version tomorrow. In the meantime, you can play with the test site with URLs like this: http://test.drfriendless.com/plays.html?geeks=Friendless,karlsen,jmdsplotter which show off the colours and the multiple geeks.
Another thing I managed to sort of achieve today was compression. A graph such as the one above retrieves a lot of data from the database – maybe 2 megabytes. Sooner or later someone has to pay for that data transfer, and someone is gonna be me, so I wanted to cut that down. Luckily, web servers and web browsers have this agreement that the browser can ask for the data to be gzipped, and if the server can do it will. One of the things AWS’s API Gateway gives me for free (for which I forgive it for being a massive pain in the arse other times) is that I can just tell it so send data compressed, if the web browser asks for it.
So I changed my code to ask for the data to be compressed, and Angular (the JavaScript framework I use to write the pages) said “NO! You are not allowed to ask for that!” Apparently it’s a sin to be running around asking for stuff to be compressed willy-nilly. And the word on the street was that the browser does it automatically.
Which it plainly was not doing. So I had a think and a search and another think, and remembered that as the request for the data was coming from extstats.drfriendless.com and going to api.drfriendless.com – a totally different place – the two ends don’t trust each other. So extstats.drfriendless.com could only ask for compressed data if it first got permission from api.drfriendless.com to do so. This is a thing called CORS, but don’t Google it, it’s horrendously complicated annoying crap that just prevents things from working. For example, it prevents sites from stealing your bank logins and that sort of stuff. But after I configured CORS, the browser was allowed to ask for the data to be compressed, and the server was configured to do it, and hey presto 90% data compression.
Although the site doesn’t have a lot of the functionality I want on it, yet, I feel that mechanically it’s approaching stability enough that I can start inviting lots of people to use it. They’ll be disappointed I expect, but I will use their misery as motivation.
The old site annoys me more and more each time I look at it. During the week we had a technician come to convert our internet connection from “cable in the house connected to cable in the street” to “cable in the house connected to fibre in the street”. That may make the old site run a little faster, but probably not a whole lot as that site’s big problems are the database architecture and the wifi link from the machine to the home network. But I had to spend an hour or two of misery trying to understand networking and Ubuntu config things that are just not problems with the new site. I think I’ll be pleased when I can close that site down.
