Until Now - The State of the union

This blog is generated using hugo, an awesome static site generator. So far, the workflow I used to deploy it was:

• Push commit to the source repository on GitLab
• GitLab CI kicks off on receiving the push
  • CI downloads latest version of hugo and generates the static site
  • Runs aws-cli to sync the new files to AWS S3
• S3 serves the static site
• Cloudflare provides:
  • DNS services (so I can use https://shantanugoel.com without having to prefix it with a www)
  • CDN/Caching services for resilience and keeping S3 bills low for data transfer

Why? What broke the camel’s back

I was mostly happy with this setup with a couple of niggles at the back of my mind, vis. a vis.:

I decided to create my own shorturl website last week for personal use and ended up developing a python project (deecubes)that can be used by anyone to do the same. This is a post to explain what/why/how about it.

Why my own shorturl website?

So far I had been using sites like bit.ly or TinyURL whenever I needed to generate a shorturl (e.g. for giving to someone for easily remember, noting down on paper, putting links on resume, etc) but I had concerns that: