Changes to how Mozilla Readability extracts article metadata in Firefox 63
Firefox Reading Mode now prefers Dublin Core and Open Graph Protocol metadata when available.
Webmaster
AMP opt-out extension for Firefox
A new browser extension gives people a choice about using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) versus the open web.
Moved to Hetzner VPS: Shorter legal docs as a competitive advantage
My previous VPS provider, Linode, required me to agree to their updated Terms of Service with not enough time to review them. Hetzner’s full contract was shorter than Linode’s preamble.
First impressions of KeyChest – A new TLS certificate expiration tracker
The new cost-free service sends you email notifications before your HTTPS certificates expire.
Keep an eye on your certificates with SSLPing
SSLPing can keep an eye on the health of your TLS certificates and email you before they expire.
Always care for old links after moving domain and reorganizing URLs
Create a URL transition-plan and create redirects for old URLs. Take a few minutes to avoid losing traffic when you move domain names or reorganize your URLs.
Linode DNS Manager pitfall: No TXT record normalization
Be wary when entering DNS TXT records in Linode DNS Manager.
How to set up ClamAV to periodically scan for badware on Fedora Linux
All the steps needed for running periodic malware scans on your Fedora installation. Recommended for Fedora Server setups!
Restore from a Linode Backup
Learn how to restore from backup in the Linode Manager.
New Brotli compression filter module now in Apache Web Server
How to enable the new Brotli compression module alongside Gzip in the Apache HTTPD server.
How to set up PHP-GeoIP with automatic location database updates in Fedora/Ubuntu
Set up auto-updating GeoIP databases and enable the PHP-GeoIP extension in your favorite Linux distributions.
IP addresses as an authentication 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.
Image quality degradation as a hotlink prevention measure and deterrent
You can deter image hotlinking and reduce the associated bandwidth costs by reducing the image quality instead of outright blocking it.
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.
Store WordPress commenter data in localStorage rather than cookies
How to move commenter data from cookies to localStorage. Reduces the amount of personal data transmitted with every HTTP request to your servers.
Internet Archive plugin for WordPress
Plugin for automatically archiving everything you publish and link to in the Internet Archive.
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.
Apache bug leads to websites dropping out of Yandex search
An Apache bug caused HTTP/2 websites to drop out of the search index at the Russian Yandex search engine.
How I dealt with web content scrapers
The tale of how I fought back against website content scrapers to protect my copyright.
UFW vs FirewallD
A look into the different strengths and weaknesses of Canonical’s Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) vs Red Hat’s FirewallD.
3 freemium website uptime monitoring services compared
A group review of the free tier of the three uptime-monitoring services Site24x7 vs StatusCake vs UptimeRobot.
My experience with Let’s Encrypt
My early-experiences obtaining HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
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
How to handle relative URLs with multiple forward slashes
Set up redirects for from URLs with too many forward-slashes in the URL path to a URL normalized addresses.
Integrate your website as a search provider in Microsoft Edge
Make your website appear as a suggested search engine in Microsoft Edge using a OpenSearch auto-discovery.
Set up a wildcard domain to catch misstyped adresses
Humans mistype ww. or wwww. all the time. Set up a wild card domain to catch and redirect all these simple mistakes to not lose out on traffic.
Recover mistyped traffic: Redirect .htm to .html
Set up redirects from variations of .html to the canonical document location. Stop losing traffic to simple-to-recover-from typos.
Diving into DigitalOcean
I’ve migrated all my websites to DigitalOcean and saved 85% on hosting compared to my previous VPS provider.
Integrate your website as a search provider in Safari Quick Website Search
How to make your website appear as a suggested search provider in Safari Quick Website Search feature.