Personal website of Mark van Eijk

Installation

composer install
pnpm install # or npm install
npx vite

Two domains, two languages

markvaneijk.com is the English site and markvaneijk.nl the Dutch one. One application, the same routes and the same paths on both: App\Http\Middleware\SetLocaleFromHost reads the host the request arrived on, and that is the whole of the difference. Which domain is which language is config/locales.php; a host that is neither — a preview domain, localhost, the console — is served in the first language listed there.

Every word lives in lang/en/site.php and lang/nl/site.php. A key the Dutch file does not have falls back to the English one, so a new page is never blank in one language: it is English until it is translated.

Each page names its other half. hreflang for both domains plus an x-default, og:locale with the alternate beside it, and a canonical that stays on the domain that was asked for. Numbers follow the language too — 1.234 and 15,3 where English writes 1,234 and 15.3 — which is what App\Support\Number is for, and robots.txt names both sitemaps because it is one file served on both.

Two things follow from the caching. The /now widgets keep the HTML they were drawn as, so the language is part of the key they keep it under: every widget is registered once per language in AppServiceProvider, and the scheduler keeps both warm. And the static cache already keeps a file per domain (static.files.include_domain), so the two sites never hand each other a page.

Locally the domain has to exist before it can pick anything, so the Dutch site needs a second name for this same directory:

valet link markvaneijk.nl    # markvaneijk.nl.test, beside markvaneijk.com.test

A third language is config/locales.php, a lang/<code>/site.php, and a domain pointed at this same application.

The /now widgets

/now reads five APIs — Spotify, Last.fm, GitHub, Strava and X — and used to read them in front of whoever asked for the page first. Each widget is now a permanently cached Blade component through backstage/laravel-permanent-cache: the HTML it renders is kept in the permanent cache store and handed out as it stands, and a scheduled run in the background is the only thing that ever waits on an API. So the first hit after a deploy costs a render rather than five round trips.

That makes the scheduler load-bearing. Without it the widgets keep whatever they were last drawn with — including nothing at all, if an API was down the one time they were drawn — so the machine serving the site needs the usual entry:

* * * * * cd /path/to/site && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

And after a deploy, before the first visitor arrives:

php artisan permanent-cache:update    # draw every widget once, in the background
php artisan permanent-cache:status    # what is cached, how big, how long ago, how often

The store is deliberately not the default one: cache:clear empties that, and an empty permanent cache is exactly the wait this removes. cache:clear permanent is how you empty this one on purpose.

Adding a widget, or drawing an existing one with different arguments, means registering that combination in AppServiceProvider — the arguments are part of the cache key, and an unregistered combination has no background run behind it. The language is one of those arguments, so a widget is two registrations. NowWidgetsTest holds resources/views/pages/now.blade.php and that list against each other.

Open Graph images

Every page links a share image that is drawn for that page — the terminal card in resources/views/vendor/og-image/template.blade.php, rendered by headless Chrome through backstage/laravel-og-image and cached in storage/app/public/og-images.

That needs two things on the machine serving the site:

brew install chromium                 # or Google Chrome; CHROME_PATH points at the binary
php artisan storage:link              # the cached images are served from public/storage

While restyling the card, set OG_IMAGE_DEBUG=true to re-render on every request, and open /og-image/preview?title=… to get the HTML instead of the image. Afterwards, php artisan og-image:clear-cache drops what was cached.