Apps and Websites Sharing Domains. Is It a Highlander Situation?

Show Notes:
Links:
Ghost
Octopress
Squarespace

Tailwind

Tyler Tringas 

Full Transcript:
Josh:
You're looking chipper, Ben.

Ben:
I'm feeling chipper, Josh.

Josh:
I'm glad.

Starr:
Yeah, there's kind of like ... you have kind of like a glow. Is this the new product glow?

Ben:
I think it is the new product glow, yes, yes.

Starr:
Okay.

Ben:
I pushed out a new feature this morning.

Josh:
Congratulations.

Ben:
Thank you, thank you. So, yeah, feeling pretty good. Had a good week, got some stuff built and deployed and things are working. I learned some things along the way, so yes, it's good.

Starr:
Awesome.

Josh:
You know, I had a pretty good week too, sleep aside. I even got enough sleep one day.

Starr:
Oh really? That's good.

Josh:
Yeah, yeah, that was a good day.

Starr:
Thank goodness, that's always terrible.

Josh:
I've been making progress on the JavaScript stuff so that's always good.

Starr:
On redoing our node client library?

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, the universal rewrite. So it's combining the client side and the server side so that they can both function basically the same code running on the front-end and back-end with a few minor differences in how the platforms handle all the important things. So, it's a bit of a can of worms but it's what the kids demand these days, so got to give them what they want.

Starr:
Like your kids? Kids are pretty-

Josh:
Yes, all my kids are demanding universal NPM packages.

Starr:
My kid just demands pizza.

Josh:
Yeah. We've been making pizza lately and it's been pretty good.

Starr:
Oh, yeah, yeah. I've been doing it too. Have you been doing the dough where you let it rise for a day and all that?

Josh:
Yeah. Caitlyn does the dough and then I do the ... We got that ... Did I tell you? I told you all about the smoker with the ... It's a pellet smoker with the ... It has a pizza oven attachment that sits right directly in whatever the furnace part of the smoker, and so you get this ... It's like a wood fire pizza oven, and it can cook your pizza at 800 degrees or higher, so it's pretty intense.

Starr:
That would be really handy. We've scaled back our pizzas just because it's really hot and nobody has AC in Seattle and neither do we. We've got a unit that we can drag up from the basement and it's ridiculously obtrusive and everything, but yeah, we just try and avoid running the oven in this weather.

Josh:
That is one nice thing about this is that it's on the porch. I spend my time out there sweating on the porch baking pizzas, but everyone else doesn't have to be bothered by it.

Starr:
Yeah, we've been grilling a lot too and we've been trying to eat less meat, and so we've got this CSA farm box thing and they give us these weird ass vegetables, so I've just been grilling them all and it turns out pretty much every vegetable is good if you just put oil on it and you grill it.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Did you know there's such a thing called garlic scapes? I didn't know this. Do y'all know what garlic scapes are?

Ben:
Nope.

Starr:
If you've ever seen a garlic plant growing, there's a garlic part that's in ... it's under the ground, right? But then there's the stem part that sticks out and it's kind of round. It has a little onion bulb on top and that is called the garlic scape. I guess you can cut them and grill them, and they're delicious. They're delicious.

Josh:
Have people always been eating these? What have we done with these for the last however long that we've been eating garlic? Because I've never heard of this before.

Starr:
I imagine that people who grow garlic have always eaten these.

Josh:
They must eat them all? Like they save the good part ... That's the good stuff probably and then we just get the-

Starr:
Yeah, it must be.

Josh:
... Yeah.

Starr:
We get the dregs.

Starr:
Yeah. I had a pretty good week too. I worked a bit on the static site for ... or the sales site for Hook Relay which is the new sort of product that Ben has been working on with Kevin, and Josh, have you been working on it too? I don't want to leave you out.

Josh:
No.

Starr:
Okay, okay.

Josh:
I've been rooting for them though.

Starr:
Okay, that's good. Everybody needs a cheerleader.

Josh:
I'm cheering hard over here.

Starr:
So yeah. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about sort of sales sites, the static site that you sort of put out into the world so people can see your app, and that's not necessarily the actual sort of app itself. So I guess we currently for this, we have our sales site hosted on a separate domain, but it wasn't always this way. When we first launched Honey Badger we had our main Rails app and the sales site was just some pages served by that app. We eventually changed that. So why did we eventually change that and move it into its own domain?

Ben:
There were a few reasons there. One of them was we got kind of tired of having to deploy the app every time we wanted to make a constant change to the website.

Starr:
I forgot about that.

Ben:
You know, because it has to go through all the test suite and everything. It's like, oh, five minutes to deploy a one word change to the site.

Starr:
It's like it made a typo, it's going to take 10 minutes to deploy.

Ben:
Yep, yep. Another thing was, as I recall, we just had customers who were getting ... Some got confused about which ... I remember we had customers who were submitting traffic to www.HoneyBadger.io. Like, API traffic instead of ... I don't know how that happened, but instead of using our API domain, they use our dub-dub domain, and because the app also responded on dub-dub, then it just worked. They're like, "Okay, cool," and we didn't notice, and then, I don't know, three years later when we were moving stuff around and changing how the hosting was going, it's like all of a sudden we broke that client because they were still sending traffic to our main domain instead of the API.

Josh:
Yeah, probably an oversight on our part. To the allow the traffic to that domain if we were hosting different roles like that, but that's just kind of how we do it.

Ben:
Yeah, but when we first launched, the Rails app did everything, right?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It was the site, it was the app, it was the API.

Josh:
Which, to be fair, I like that a little bit. There's something about just having one thing that was nice and-

Ben:
Yeah, it's simple.

Josh:
... There's some other benefits, like you can do weird things with the sales site that integrates. Well, you can display a ... It's easy to show a logged in link or something because you have the cookies and everything right there, the session, because it's all just your app, but yeah, it presents other issues once you ... down the road.

Starr:
So Ben, were you telling me that somebody was discussing this? Was that in the discourse?

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So a few weeks ago on Twitter ... I think Tyler Tringas brought this up. I think he was just throwing out some advice for people who are starting up, and he's like, "Here's a piece of advice that you'll like down the road. Separate your app from your sales site," and a lot of people were like, "Huh? Why?" And other people were like, "Yes, totally." And all the "yes, t...