Whenever my website receives a comment, like, repost, or other mention, I display those responses on the post's permalink, along with author information if available. For likes and reposts, I show the profile photo in a list, so there are sometimes lots of photos there.
For a while now, I've been archiving these profile photos myself in order to avoid various issues caused by hotlinking these images (mixed-content warnings, potential security issues by including remote images, and having avatars disappear when people change their URLs). It's been great because it speeds up the loading of the images since everything is coming from one domain, and I no longer have broken avatars on old posts. However, there was one problem with this plan, which was sometimes peoples' avatars would be huge! Like over 1000 pixels tall, and I was showing it in a 48px square space.
Today, I updated the code that archives these avatars to resize them to a max of 256 pixels tall.
This code was written in node.js and running on Amazon Lambda. It was the first (and last) project I've run on Lambda, and I did it as a sort of experiment when Lambda first launched. It wasn't too difficult to figure out the ImageMagick commands in Node.js to do the resizing. But... then I went to go and update the code on Lambda, and that was a nightmare. For starters, they're running a new Node.js version now, so I had to update my system to that to ensure I was bundling the right versions of libraries. Then there were some other changes around permissions and things too, which I didn't totally understand. Then I started getting intermittent errors after I tried launching the new version. Ultimately I got fed up and decided to rewrite the project in Ruby and run it on my own server.
It turns out I ended up spending about as much time rewriting the app in Ruby as it took to launch and debug the updated version on Lambda. On the plus side, the code is also way easier to understand now, since it's normal synchronous Ruby instead of async Node code that always turns into a mess. It's also only 100 lines now instead of the previous 150 in Node. Here's the new app.
I didn't change the external facing API, and images are still stored on S3, so my apps that use this project don't have to change at all except for which endpoint they talk to.
Ultimately, this change is only very slightly visible. The end result is now my posts won't be potentially embedding super large images shrunk down to 48px. This code is also used by webmention.io, so if you're using that to receive Webmentions, then you also have this change now!
