Webmaster - Ctrl blog (Page 2)

A login form with a user name and password field floating in front of a mountain range.

Authentication and Passwords

IP addresses as an auth factor in the era of device roaming and IPv6

Stop relying on IP addresses not changing in an IPv6-enabled world were devices randomly change their address at least once a day.

A side-by-side comparison of a detailed high-quality image of a dripping wet man next to a scaled-down version of the same image in lower quality.

Hypertext

Image quality degradation as a hotlink deterrent

You can deter image hotlinking and reduce the associated bandwidth costs by reducing the image quality instead of outright blocking it.

A web server log with dozens of identical requests coming in at the exact same time. The log entries are for a file called “/robots.txt” and from a User-Agent called “AppleNewsBot”. A…

Hypertext

Attack of the AppleNewsBot

A bug in the Apple News crawler caused it to get stuck in a loop sending 100+ requests/second to websites with HTTPS certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt.

Two cookies on a plate with some oranges and a glass of milk in the background.

Webmaster

Store WordPress commenter data in localStorage rather than cookies

How to move commenter data from cookies to localStorage. Reduces the amount of personal data needlessly transmitted with every HTTP request to your web servers.

Webmaster

Internet Archive plugin for WordPress

A WordPress plugin for automatically archiving everything you publish and external links in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Help preserve your work.

A sad-looking robot made out of cardboard.

Open Standards

Robot discrimination: No robots allowed, except Googlebot

A survey shows how many websites discriminate against and block all search engines and spiders except GoogleBot in their /robots.txt files.

A small black bug made out of Lego bricks.

Apache HTTPD

Apache bug leads to websites dropping out of Yandex search

An Apache server bug caused HTTP/2 websites to drop out of the Yandex search engine. Here’s how to work around the bug to get your site back into the Yandex index.

A large number of books laying open and exposing their yellowing pages.

Copyright

How I dealt with web content scrapers

The tale of how I fought back against website content scrapers to protect my copyright. I returned auto-generated garbage content, and they gobbled it up.

A person swirling a burning rope forming a litteral firewall in front of them.

Linux

UFW vs FirewallD

A look into the different strengths and weaknesses of Canonical’s Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) vs Red Hat’s FirewallD firewall solutions for Linux.

Three stone crains in front of a waterfall.

Web Analytics

3 freemium website uptime monitoring services compared

A group review of the free tiers of the three uptime-monitoring services: Site24x7 vs StatusCake vs UptimeRobot.

A frosted blue padlock securing an old wooden door.

Security

My experience with Let’s Encrypt

My early-adopter experiences obtaining free HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

Microsoft Windows

User-Agent of Microsoft Edge on Xbox One with Windows 10

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; Xbox; Xbox One) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2486.0 Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10553