Blog Posts by Andrew B. Collier / @datawookie

SSH Tunnel: Remote Port Forwarding

SSH Linux
A tunnel with large yellow earth-moving equipment.

Local and remote SSH tunnels serve the same fundamental purpose: they make it possible to securely send data across an unsecured network. The implementation details are subtly different though. A local SSH tunnel acts like a secure bridge from a local machine to a remote server. It’s ideal for accessing services on the remote server which aren’t publicly exposed. Conversely, a remote SSH tunnel reverses this direction, forwarding traffic from the remote server back to a local machine (or another machine).

The critical distinction between the two is the direction of the connection between the remote and local machines.

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SSH Tunnel: Local Port Forwarding

SSH Linux
A tunnel with large yellow earth-moving equipment.

SSH tunnels are a powerful and secure method for transmitting data over potentially unsecured networks. They allow users to establish an encrypted connection between their local machine and a remote server, providing a secure and private pathway for data. An SSH tunnel will allow a service running on a remote machine to appear as if it is running on a local machine. This is also known as port forwarding.

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Static Redirects on Vercel

Moored boats in an art deco style.

A redirect is a rule which sends users to a different URL than the one they requested. They are most commonly used to ensure that browsers still get to the correct page after it has been moved to a new URL.

If you have a relatively small number of redirects and don’t need to do anything too fancy then static (or “configuration”) redirects are a good option. Static redirects are configured on Vercel by adding entries to the vercel.json configuration file. There’s just one major snag: you can only create 1024 redirects using this mechanism.

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Batch Resolving Merge Conflicts

Git
A surrealistic image of the confluence between two rivers.

Sometimes when you run git merge you will be confronted with a huge load of merge conflicts. However, if you are lucky there might be a clear rule which you can apply to each of those conflicts, either

  • accept current change (change on current branch or ours) or
  • accept incoming change (incoming change from other branch or theirs).

In this case you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by specifying a particular merge strategy option.

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Externalise CSS

Externalise CSS

By default Gatsby will embed CSS into the <head> of each HTML page. This is not ideal. In this post I take a look at how to move that CSS into an external file and how the contents of that file can be optimised to remove unused CSS.

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Dynamic Routing

Gatsby Month of Gatsby
Dynamic Routing with Gatsby

Suppose that you want to make your site routing a little more flexible. For example, rather than just going straight to a 404 page if the path is not found, you might want to try and guess an appropriate (and valid!) path. This is where dynamic routing comes into play.

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Custom 404 Page

Gatsby Month of Gatsby
Custom 404 Page

Setting up a custom 404 page can add something special to your site. It provides you with the opportunity to do something memorable in the unfortunate event that a user asks for an unknown page.

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Gatsby on Netlify

Gatsby on Netlify

Deploying a Gatsby site can feel like a daunting task, especially with the array of potential hosting platforms. Among them, Netlify is a strong contender due to its seamless integration and deployment process. Netlify is actively engaged in improving support for Gatsby on their platform. This post will show how to get your Gatsby site live on Netlify.

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Cookies & Headers from Selenium

Cookies & Headers from Selenium

One of my standard approaches to scraping content from a dynamic website is to diagnose the API behind the site and then use it to retrieve data directly. This means that I can make efficient HTTP requests using the requests package and I don’t need to worry about all of the complexity around scraping with Selenium. However, it’s often the case that the API requests require a collection of cookies and headers, and those need to be gathered using Selenium.

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Adding robots.txt to a Gatsby Site

Adding robots.txt to a Gatsby Site

There are a couple files which can have an impact on the SEO performance of a site: (1) a sitemap and (2) a robots.txt. In a previous post we set up a sitemap which includes only the canonical pages on the site. In this post we’ll add a robots.txt.

A Gatsby site will not have a robots.txt file by default. There’s a handy package which makes it simple though. We’ll take a look at how to add it to the site and a couple of ways to configure it too.

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