Moving Large Markdown Assets to a CDN

I’ve spent a while today trying to bring down the size of this project, I have several posts that are particularly large so I wanted to work out a way to reduce that.

I’m an Ubuntu user and wanted to see if there was a way I could identify the larger files in the project.

I found this SO question which details using the du command (Disk Usage) which I used to list out the folder sizes. I put the following command into my terminal:

du --max-depth=7 /home/scott/repos/thelocalhost/posts/ | sort -n

It gave a similar output to this:

592   /thelocalhost/posts/2017/01/04/twitter-mctwitbot
2412	/thelocalhost/posts/2017/01/28/twitter-bot-bootstrap
38708	/thelocalhost/posts/2018/12/24/wsl-bootstrap-2019

The output was a bit noisier that what I’ve put here actually, lot’s of output, but it helped identify large assets in folders. That wsl-bootstrap-2019 folder is nearly 40mb in size! 😱

Markdown file structure

I have become quite particular about my Markdown as of late and like to structure things in a certain way. I started to do this with the images and gifs that are in here as well.

So, as an example this:

![twitter logo](./twitter-bird.png)

I got to doing this from finding it on [GitHub](https://github.com) I
think I was looking for the Twitter icon in bootstrap whilst
working...

Will become this:

![twitter logo]

I got to doing this from finding it on [GitHub] I think I was looking
for the Twitter icon in bootstrap whilst working...

<!-- Links -->

[github]: https://github.com

<!-- Images -->

[twitter logo]: ./twitter-bird.png

It looks like the second option here takes more space but the links at the bottom of the document aren’t visible and it makes the writing experience a lot easier to parse and manage when there are a lot of links and assets in the document.

Cool story bro

So I’m putting this here to document what I did, the assets in the large folder I mentioned earlier have now been removed and added to the Now CDN in their own folder.

So now at the end of each document, rather than have a load of local files in the same folder they can all be references to the CDN.

How do I add them to a CDN? I make a folder with the same(ish) folder structure then reference the CDN in place of the local images:

images-on-now-sh/
├─ 2020/
├── this-post-im-talking-about/
│   ├─ image1.png
│   ├─ image2.png
│   └─ image3.png

The whole reason I did this was so that if I wanted to I could run all these through a service like Images.weserv.nl where I could add the URL to their service like so:

[image1]: //images.weserv.nl/?url=https://images-on-now-sh/2020/this-post-im-talking-about/image1.png&w=300&h=300

I’ve not done that as yet, I have got a 25% faster build time for the site though.

What CDN?

The CDN I talk about is Vercel’s Now platform, which I think in time is going to be called just Vercel, as the Now bot that used to look after your GitHub deploys is now called Vercel so they may be consolidating everything into just Vercel.

I loaded the assets to the Vercel CDN with the Now CLI, so in the folder that contains the assets do a now or now --prod to push the assets to the Vercel CDN.

Any time I now have a post with a lot of assets images I’m not going to feel that bad about adding them. I have however stopped doing this so much and instead try to provide a video detailing something with accompanying copy.