X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Prachett

I finally added an X-Clacks-Overhead header to my site, woohoo!

What is that, and why finally?

For the what: see this blog post about when I discovered it.

For the “finally” part: my site is hosted on AWS S3, with AWS CloudFront in front of it. This has been the case since 2016. Only in 2021 did AWS make it easy to add a simple static HTTP header to responses leaving their CDN. Indeed, it was possible to use Lambda@Edge or CloudFront Functions to achieve this before Response Header Policies came along, but damn did they seem like a very over-engineered solution to adding a static header. So I never did. But finally the most basic seeming functionality was added to their CDN, and a year later I remembered to get around to using it to add this header :)