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shoes
No dynamically redirecting URLs anymore for downloads
Hi everyone,
since the move to github pages we don't have dynamically redirecting URLs anymore.
The question is: can we fix that somehow?
Shoes on! Tobi
That doesn't help.
We need shoesrb.com/download/mac to redirect to s3. JS can't do that, that I know of.
I haven't used Davis.js but by looking at their example wouldn't the following work?
var app = Davis(function () {
this.get('/download/:os', function (req) {
if (req.params['os'] == 'mac') {
window.location.replace(...)
}
else {
...
}
})
})
app.start()
I haven't used Davis.js before but looking at their example wouldn't the following work?
var app = Davis(function () { this.get('/download/mac', function (req) { window.location.replace(...) }) })
app.start()
It would work for clients that evaluate javascript, I think. Has anyone used this technique before? (meta tag with refresh of 0)
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H76.html
Seems what we want, though I don't know if all clients would follow it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_refresh#Usability. It does seem like the best option though.
if we do it/try it we would still have to make that it works without JavaScript. I'm a noscript user and I want the basic functionality of shoesrb.com to be available without JS :-)
Uses for these download URLs:
- folks browsing the shoes site for a shoes download
- other sites wanting to promote shoes, by linking to downloads
- shoes itself, so that it can download and/or update itself
This last one has always been the trickiest one. In Shoes 3, there is an option to package a Shoes app without Shoes. It comes with a small stub that only knows how to download and install the latest version of Shoes. It does not know how to navigate links or javascript. Actually, if I remember correctly, the stub hits a particular URL, which returns a text/plain string. That string is the URL for the download. I don't know if Shoes 4 will have this same kind of stub installer, but it seems prudent to think about this use case. We want to have a stable URL that can (somehow) direct clients to the real current URL.
Idea! GitHub has a releases API. So we could implement it several ways. None of which, unfortunately, will work outside of the browser.
The Meta Refresh/JavaScript Way
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>
$.getJSON('https://api.github.com/repos/shoes/shoes/releases', function(data) {
release = data[0].tarball_url;
$('head').append('<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=' + release + '">');
});
</script>
<title>Latest Shoes Release</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
This will have jQuery append a meta refresh/redirect to the head, which will in turn download the tarball.
The JavaScript Only Way Just pretend this is in the head of the same document.
$.getJSON('https://api.github.com/repos/shoes/shoes/releases', function(data) {
release = data[0].tarball_url;
window.location.href = release;
});
Let me know what you think.
As for OS specific downloads, it really depends on how Shoes releases will released. But I'm sure I can make it work.