I added well-known URLs to my website

I've been reading Jim Nielsen's blog for a while. He writes about all sorts of interesting stuff, and one thing I recall standing out to me was two of his posts about using Well known URI's for outgoing links and for your personal avatar.

And after I remade my website with Deno Fresh I thought I should try to add those to my site as well. And now I have!

Outgoing links

You can go to timharek.no/.well-known/links and you'll see all the outgoing links for my website. They are even sorted by how many times each domain appears. You can also use a query parameter to check if I link to your website (like Jim's), like this: timharek.no/.well-known/links?domain=github.com

My solution is much different from Jim's, because I don't use marked.js. I had to render out all my Markdown first, then do some DOM-query selector logic in order to filter out both internal and outgoing links. I didn't read the blogpost before I had written all the code 😅 So I might switch out Deno GFM in the future.

And my solution is missing the property sourceUrl which is useful to see where the different links appear. This is on my todo-list!

Personal avatar

You can go to timharek.no/.well-known/avatar and you should see my face :) Here I don't have any query parameters, yet. It could be interesting to add some like ?accessories=glasses or ?type=logo.

And my solution was just a few lines of TypeScript with Deno.

const avatarPath = new URL("../../static/img/me.jpeg", import.meta.url)
try {
  const avatar = await Deno.readFile(avatarPath)

  return new Response(avatar, {
    headers: { "content-type": "image/jpeg" },
  })
} catch (error) {
  console.error(error)
  return new Response(JSON.stringify({ message: "No avatar available." }), {
    headers: { "content-type": "application/json; charset=utf-8" },
  })
}

I might not even need the try-catch, but I like to be safe – just in case.

Conclusion

I like the idea of well-known URIs, it would be an easy way to keep stuff a bit more standardized, which could come in handy for blogs etc. And it makes checking for URL errors easier, and it gives me a standard way to know where I keep my avatar.

I might have to check out more well-known URIs to implement them to my site(s) as well.