Aaron Parecki

My blog post from 2012 titled "OAuth 2 Simplified" is my most popular article on my website by an order of magnitude. It is referenced by over 400 repositories on GitHub, and ranks very high in searches about OAuth. I still get tweets over four years later from people who discover it for the first time and are very appreciative of finding a succinct summary of the protocol. I wrote it in 2012, when OAuth 2.0 was still relatively new, and it was based on the best practices at the time. Today I was reviewing the post, and realized that there were quite a few places where the industry standards have changed either in the terminology or in the best practices. I decided that I wanted to publish a new version of the post updated for 2017 based on what has happened in the industry over the last few years. I didn't feel comfortable updating the post at its current URL, from 2012, since that seemed like it would be rewriting history. But at the same time, I don't want to make people landing on that post from a web search or link from a GitHub repository to have to click another time to see the latest version of the post.I decided on an interesting compromise. I took the existing post, rewrote parts of it, and published it at a new URL: https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/I then took the old post, copied it verbatim, and published it at a new URL dated the same date as the old post: https://aaronparecki.com/2012/07/29/7/oauth2-simplifiedThe final step was creating a redirect from the post's old URL https://aaronparecki.com/2012/07/29/2/oauth2-simplified (note the "2" vs the "7") to the new URL that has no date component. (This is the part that required a new bit of code for p3k, in order to handle redirects from posts that would have otherwise matched a post permalink.)My plan going forward is to always keep the version at https://aaronparecki.com/oauth-2-simplified/ up to date, and to keep snapshots of older versions at date-based permalinks at the time when I publish an updated version. I link to the previous versions of the post at the bottom of the primary post. (Manually for now, until I decide this is an important enough feature to automate). I think this strike the right balance between providing visitors with the most current information with the least amount of effort, while still preserving the history of the older versions.

Thanks to @Zegnat and @sebsel for finding some new new edges case in Webmention discovery that deserve new tests!The new test, #22, advertises its Webmention endpoint with a URL that is relative to the page (e.g. <link rel="webmention" href="22/webmention">). The existing relative URL tests were absolute paths (e.g. <link rel="webmention" href="/test/22/webmention">).

Over the last couple years I've occasionally posted a recipe on my website, but I'd always just done it as a plain text post, nothing fancy. Today I updated p3k to support a new post type, h-recipe. Now I can properly format and display recipes on my site!