The root cause of 'PDF/arXiv previews simply do not work' was twofold:
1. nginx/popup-proxy.conf was never installed on the VPS — every
/proxy/* request (arXiv, PubMed, Internet Archive) returned nginx's
default 404. Now installed (snippets + http{}-context cache/limit
zones in conf.d, included in the vhost, nginx -t verified, reloaded).
2. The snippet itself had a latent bug that only surfaced once
installed: with a VARIABLE upstream, a URI part on proxy_pass is
passed literally — every request hit the upstream's homepage
(archive.org HTML where JSON was expected, arXiv 429s, NCBI doc-page
redirects). Fixed with explicit prefix-strip rewrites; bad cached
responses purged. All three proxies verified returning real data,
including a live arXiv title resolve.
Client-side improvements:
- arXiv match covers old-style IDs (cs/9901002, math.GT/0309136,
cond-mat/...v1) alongside new-style, and .pdf-suffixed /pdf/ URLs
(regex verified against six forms)
- Wikipedia popups show the article's lead image: pageimages rides
along the existing extracts call (pithumbsize=320), rendered via a
new https-only image slot in renderPopup with float styling;
upload.wikimedia.org added to the CSP's img-src
- pdf-thumbs now walks all of static/ (pdfjs pruned), so /cv.pdf and
/resume.pdf — the most-linked internal PDFs, previously thumbnail-less
and therefore popup-less — get hover previews
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
