Instant copy-paste

[neersighted]

Editing the index.html file to serve the CSS off of raw.github.com would me people would not need the asset locally, but would mean that if Github goes down, so does the ribbon. Thoughts?

[simonwhitaker]

I had the same thought – basically that you could use GitHub as a rough-and-ready Content Delivery Network (CDN). However, I did some investigation and it sounds as though hosting from raw.github.com is not the way to go.

A Google search on "github as cdn" comes up with GitHub as a CDN, which suggests using Google Pages as a CDN. That looks like it'd work better (it sets an HTTP Expires header that's 24 hours from now), but not sure if it's what you'd expect (or want) from a proper CDN. See below for HTTP headers from a call to raw.github.com, a call to the corresponding Github Pages URL, and (for comparison) a call to the Google CDN link for jQuery 1.8.0.

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://raw.github.com/simonwhitaker/github-fork-ribbon-css/master/gh-fork-ribbon.css
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.0.13
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:20:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Connection: keep-alive
Status: 200 OK
X-Frame-Options: deny
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 100
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
X-RateLimit-Limit: 100
ETag: "82998edc12e52d04f393ca2c79dd757c"
Content-Length: 2732
Cache-Control: private
X-Runtime: 10
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Disposition: inline

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -D - http:https://simonwhitaker.github.com/github-fork-ribbon-css/gh-fork-ribbon.css
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.0.13
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 13:21:02 GMT
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Length: 2732
Last-Modified: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 04:05:50 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Expires: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 13:21:02 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=86400
Accept-Ranges: bytes

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -D - https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.0/jquery.min.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 20:05:59 GMT
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2012 01:57:22 GMT
Expires: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 01:57:22 GMT
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Server: sffe
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Age: 559468
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

[simonwhitaker]

So in short, I'm going to close this issue. It's OK to let people grab the assets for themselves for the time being.

[neersighted]

@simonwhitaker One other possibility is serving it off Heroku (AWS East 2), using my nginx build pack.