Building Linked List -- an experiment in web design/architecture/application
An Experiment in Performant Web Application Design

I noticed that many of my collegues have a collection of snippets of knowledge that they store
in software like Evernote, nvAlt, Simplenote or just a collection of text files. I referred to
my own such collection to help a collegue out one day and it dawned on me that there was no
reason I couldn't publish many of my notes for others to refer to.

I have a blog (you're reading it now!) that I've published these type of notes
to before but there's a certain barrier to entry to writing a full blog post.
There's an implied need to include more explanation and sometimes that's enough
to put me off posting, especially for small snippets. Additionally blogs tend
to feel time based, the posts existing in a snapshot of time in which they
were posted.

Wikis are another alternative but to me they of often feel messy and ugly. Additionally
there's that barrier to entry for writing posts: Login, create link to new page, write
page, publish. All of which is generally done in a dinky text area and not a proper text
editor.

What I wanted was a system that made publishing a snippet as simple as editing a file
and had a clean design. The end result was pkb and [linkedlist.org][Linked List].

I built the core of the app in a weekend and refied it over the following weeks.
The result is something of an experiment and playground for me. It has:

* No database
* Zero JavaScript (and by extension no analytics)
* No images
* No media queries
* 5.9Kb of CSS (uncompressed)
* Uses a CDN to deliver assets
* Varnish caching
* HTTPS everywhere
* Freely available code

It works as follows:

I have a folder full of Markdown files on my computer. Each file is a page on
Linked List, the filename minus the `.md` being its URL. New and updated files
are syncronised to the server using Syncthing.

### Syncing

Origianlly I was going to use
Dropbox but headless installations are not well supported and using the API
felt like overkill. Syncthing works great on the server and is more flexible
than Dropbox to boot (multiple synced folders the can sync from arbirary
locations on the source and destingation machines).

### Design

Using ideas from http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com and its ispiration http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com I used just enough CSS to make the site clean and easy to read. There's not grid, no Bootstrap or similar as a result it's fluid and responsive by default.

Fonts proved a chanllenged. Originally I used a font stack that preferred Hoefler Text but after
upgading to OS X 10.11 "El Capitan", that [broke in Safari][hoefler-tweet]. I really didn't want
to use web fonts as they bloat the page and cause undesired behaviour (flash of unstlyed content
or invisible text) but with Hoefler text out of picture I decided to use [ET Book], self hosted.

### NoJS

Up until the need to consider web fonts there had been no need for JavaScript. Since...blah blah
try to stick with no JS.

### NoDB

Wanted to use flat files as much as possible. Each file has YAML front-matter with metadata in
it: E.g. [linkedlist.org/bulk-delete-from-s3](https://linkedlist.org/bulk-delete-from-s3):

    ---
    title: Delete in Bulk from S3
    tags: [aws, s3, ruby]
    ---

    Given a list of objects to delete the following [Ruby](https://linkedlist.org/tags/ruby)
    snippet will delete them in batches of 100:

    # ruby
    require 'shellwords'

    ARGF.lines.each_slice(100) do |slice|
      system "aws --profile bellroy s3 rm #{slice.map { |l| l.strip.shellescape }.join(' ')}"
    end

    ---

    Input file looks like:

    s3://files.bellroy.com/E1HJ4ISXVG05CA.2015-02-23-15.c074f93f.gz
    s3://files.bellroy.com/E1HJ4ISXVG05CA.2015-02-23-15.d3d2a169.gz
    s3://files.bellroy.com/E1HJ4ISXVG05CA.2015-02-23-21.02ed8e8d.gz

## Blah

Implemented the Rails app naievely: the page is rendered each time it's requested.
The index page and tags pages itereate over all the files. Varnish takes care of
making that efficient

### Challenges

DDG index

### What's Next

Automatic invalidation

### TODO

Goals: quick to build, easy to post to, clean design, good performance.

With discussion about mobile web performance, content blockers, 

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/tools_dont_solv.html
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9002721/the-mobile-web-sucks
https://brooksreview.net/2015/09/content-blocker-test/

https://instantarticles.fb.com/

It's easy to reach for Bootstrap, Typekit, throw Google Analytics on a page and call it done
but how large is the page? How much of Bootstrap are you using? Do you really those analytics
and allow Google to track all your visitors?

With a bunch of the reading I'd don't over the last few months in mind I decided to build Linked List
in a way that followed these ideas and best practices.

* Minimal CSS
* No JS
* Varnish
* CDN
* No framework, minimal, semantic markup
* Clean readable design
* No analytics
* The debate about fonts
* No or few images

[Linked List]: https://linkedlist.org/
[vim]: http://www.vim.org/
[hoefler-tweet]: https://twitter.com/wezm/status/649716551956828160
[ET Book]: https://github.com/edwardtufte/et-book