Wednesday, 18th December 2019
Microbrowsers are Everywhere (via) Colin Bendell introduces a new-to-me term, “microbrowsers”, to describe the user-agents which hit websites to generate unfurled link previews in messenger apps. Twitter and Facebook first popularized them, but today you’re likely getting far more preview-generating traffic from chat clients such as iMessage, WhatsApp and Slack (which won’t execute script and ignore cookies, and hence won’t show up in Google Analytics). Lots of great tips here—one example: if you provide three og:image meta tags iMessage will render them as a collage.
GitHub Actions ci.yml for deno. Spotted this today: it’s one of the cleanest examples I’ve seen of a complex CI configuration for GitHub Actions, testing, linting, benchmarking and building Ryan Dahl’s Deno JavaScript runtime.
athena-sqlite (via) Amazon Athena is the AWS tool for querying data stored in S3—as CSV, JSON or Apache Parquet files—using SQL. It’s an interesting way of buliding a very cheap data warehouse on top of S3 without having to run any additional services. Athena recently added a query federation SDK which lets you define additional custom data sources using Lambda functions. Damon Cortesi used this to write a custom connector for SQLite, which lets you run queries against data stored in SQLite files that you have uploaded to S3. You can then run joins between that data and other Athena sources.