Photo by Joey Rozier

One of the most fun parts of working on Jetpac has been following Cathrine’s stellar posts on the company blog. She’s had some amazing finds, including surprises like the hammock tent! We’ve had hundreds of thousands of visitors and a lot of links, but until recently I didn’t realize that having a separate subdomain at blog.jetpac.com meant that we didn’t get the full search ranking benefit. We’re hosted on Tumblr, so I assumed moving things over to a subdirectory would be fairly straightforward, but it turned out to be surprisingly tough. In the end I not only had to manually proxy all /blog content through our frontend servers, I even had to rewrite the page content on the fly to remove hard-coded links! I found a couple of examples in PHP, but nothing that worked with our Ruby and Sinatra setup, so here’s what we ended up with:

https://gist.github.com/petewarden/3950261

In brief, this code intercepts all URLs that start with /blog on a site, and pulls the content from the equivalent yourblog.tumblr.com. If the page is HTML, it also does some quick-and-dirty regex alterations to change any root URLs in links and resource references to point to the new /blog versions. Not my most elegant bit of code, but it seems to be doing the job.