Get Redirect URL with cURL
URL redirects can be glorious or annoying depending on which side of them you are on and which side you want to be on. Redirects are helpful for vanity URLs (useful in advertising) but sometimes they're annoying in that they could potentially break your code if you encounter a redirect you weren't anticipating.
The useful and amazing cURL command line utility allows you to fetch an address and return its final destination URL:
# "/css" doesn't exist but WordPress tries to find the closest match
# and then redirects to it ("/css-animation-callback")
curl -Ls -w %{url_effective} -o /dev/null https://davidwalsh.name/css
# Outputs: https://davidwalsh.name/css-animation-callback
The url_effective variable is what we're after. The L directive tells cURL to follow redirects, the s directive tells cURL to be silent (i.e. not output the page contents). You provide the URL, cURL follows it to its endpoint -- easy!
![Serving Fonts from CDN]()
For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain). Along with those assets are custom web fonts. Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...
![CSS Animations Between Media Queries]()
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
![Drag. Drop. Lock.]()
I've received dozens of emails about my Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools article. The MooTools in my article contained a lot of conditional code to require correct dropping per the game and many people requested that I simplify the process and just...
Follow a URL using JavaScript: https://www.npmjs.com/package/linkfollower