We Gave Everyone a URL Instead of a Business Card

Web Development
Self-Hosting
CEDIA
For CEDIA we built name.at.diligentservices.io pages for the team: a MySpace-flavored profile, a downloadable contact card, a QR code, and one Rick Astley surprise. Here’s how it works and why it’s all static files.
Author

Sam M

Published

August 21, 2026

Business cards are forgettable. QR codes that open a business card are also forgettable. So before CEDIA we gave everyone at Diligent Services a page at their own name, like sam.at.diligentservices.io.

We stole the idea from at.hn, which we found on Hacker News.

What a page does

Each page is an old-school, MySpace-flavored profile: photo on the left, bio on the right, and a “Save my card” button that downloads a vCard with a phone number, email, and the page URL. Add /qr to any page and you get a QR code for it, sized for a badge or a bar napkin.

There is one more thing. The first time a browser opens one of our pages, it plays about ten seconds of Rick Astley before showing the profile. You can skip it, and a cookie means it only happens once. Every roll increments a counter, and rickroll.at.diligentservices.io shows the canonical video plus a leaderboard of who has been rolled the most. Yes, you can cheat with incognito mode. We know.

How it’s built

The whole thing is static files, in the same spirit as this site:

  1. Profiles are flat TOML files. A small Python script renders them to HTML, vCards, and QR codes at build time.
  2. A safety check runs before every build and refuses to publish a page with a street address, a birthday, or a phone number anywhere it doesn’t belong.
  3. The rickroll counter is an nginx empty_gif beacon written to its own access log. A one-minute timer folds the log into a static leaderboard.json. No database, no backend, nothing to get owned.
  4. TLS renews itself, including a wildcard certificate for names that don’t exist yet, via a tiny delegated DNS zone.

If you’d like the same setup for your company, the whole stack is public at github.com/samstevenm/rraas — RickRoll as a Service, MIT licensed, our production config as-is. Fork it, swap the names, roll your friends. Email sam@diligentservices.io if you get stuck.

(G611)