Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 9, 2021

TinyPilot

Management

• Hired a new developer to work on the TinyPilot website
• Scheduled the next sprint planning meeting
• Found a new accountant
• 1:1 with one of TinyPilot’s developers
• Wrote a spec describing my ideas for a redesign of the TinyPilot sales site

Software development

• Investigated an issue where TinyPilot fails to redirect from HTTPS to HTTP
  • We still can’t figure it out, so suggestions welcome
  • On Chrome, if you visit http://tinypilot.local (plaintext) and click a link to https://tinypilot.local (TLS), it does two odd things
    • It excludes cookies when you click the link, but if you copy the link URL and paste it into the URL bar, it includes the link. It also sets the Sec-Fetch-Site header to cross-site, whereas when you type the URL directly, it’s set to none
    • This behavior doesn’t happen when you drop the .local domain from the URL (it includes the cookies in that case)
    • Additionally, when you have the .local suffix, instead of redirecting to HTTPS URLs, nginx redirects to plaintext HTTP URLs, but when you strip the .local suffix, it redirects to the correct HTTPS URLs
• Reviewed PRs to allow TinyPilot users to relax the TLS requirement on their devices
• Reviewed PRs for the REST API documentation
• Paid monthly fees to my affiliates

Product research

• Reached out to more EE firms about building a PoE HAT

mtlynch.io

• Published my June retrospective

WanderJest

• Verified that my SEO strategy is working
  • Now, in Western Massachusetts, when you search for “standup comedy near me” or “comedy in northampton ma”, WanderJest is on the first page of results
• Read SerpDB’s series on Programmatic SEO, per the recommendation of Thenuka Karunaratne, my most knowledgeable friend in the SEO space
  • Takeaways
    • URL structure routes should match logical hierarchies
      • Before: /shows/<category>/us/<state>/<city>
      • After: /shows/us/<state>/<city>/<category>
      • Logically, show category is a subset of shows near a particular city
    • If Google is indexing <80% of your pages, improve quality so that Google thinks more of your site is index-worthy
      • I reduced the number of pre-generated pages in my sitemap. Before I was including pre-generated pages for improv and storytelling, but those aren’t popular enough as search terms, so I reduced the sitemap pages to just comedy shows in general and standup
• Added 6 new shows to the index
• Tweaked the card UI so that the images fit the cards a little better
• Improved error logging for when scraping event data from Facebook fails (looks like they’ve recently stopped publishing structured event data)
• Improved error checking when accepting user-generated show descriptions
• Start working on filtering shows based on the user’s IP geolocation data

Dusty VCR

• Published the first new episode since before lockdown
• Moved from Google Feedburner (which has been about to die for years) and switched to my own self-hosted solution
  • I don’t want to marry myself to any particular podcast host, so I always distribute my RSS feed with my custom domain: https://feeds.dustyvcr.com/dustyvcr
  • I used to point this domain to Feedburner, who would mirror my real RSS feed URL at Anchor.fm, but to users, they could access the feed through my custom URL
  • The problem was that Feedburner didn’t support TLS, and it just officially went into maintenance mode this month.
  • I realized that all I really need is a server that proxies HTTP calls from end-users to my real RSS feed, so I created rss-proxy
  • rss-proxy is dead simple. It’s just a Google Cloud Function that receives an HTTP request, forwards it to my real RSS server at Anchor, then returns the result to the client
• Updated feed URL on a few platforms to point to the new HTTPS version

Misc

• Did personal bookkeeping
• Scheduled first doctor’s appointment in a while (just a checkup)
• Rebalanced my investments and withdrew some money to invest in TinyPilot