Internet privacy: insights for website owners
This post focusses on the battleground that is internet privacy, and its implications for website owners. We're going to take a quick look at things like how the data protection rules apply to...
Making documentation happen
New year: it’s a good time to talk about process. Process improvement is easy to want and often difficult to implement. We all set out with good intentions, but there’s that whole thing about the...
Google Translate Vs CSP. Fight!
Recently we were asked to implement a Content Security Policy (CSP) onto an existing site. The process of retro fitting CSP goes something like this: Put in a restrictive policy Test the...
How To Generate AVIF Images In PHP Today
The AVIF image format is a really exciting, it promises much higher compression without any noticeable loss of quality and is supported in most of the major browsers. If you want all the nitty...
Page Speed Insights Scores Aren't As Stable As You'd Think
We use a number of different tools when profiling our sites performance. PageSpeed Insights is one that gives you a nice high level and easy to compare scores. Recently though, I've become aware...
Adding Variable CSP Nonces To Static Sites
We build all different sized sites, some call for a full blown CMS but others are more suited to a static approach. These static sites come with some unique problems when it comes to CSP and...
Making sense of IoT
The IoT is not new. It’s essentially been with us since the first computers connected to the first networks. But from conceptual beginnings to real-world implementations in a few short years, it’s...
Incrementally Copying (Rsyncing) Files From A Kubernetes Pod
The most obvious choice for moving files in and out of containers is kubectl cp but it just does a straight copy of all the bytes. If you want to backup just a few changed bytes out of several...
Why You Should Always Give Lazily Loaded Images A Width & Height
When images are set to load lazily they will only be downloaded when they come into view but what counts as "in view"? It seems Google Chrome only takes the vertical scroll position into account...
Persisting Data Between Steps In BitBucket Pipeline Builds
When using a build pipeline it is common to create some kind of value, like a path, container ID, auth token etc in one step which is then needed in a subsequent step but the whole point of steps...
Using FallbackResource with Apache Header Expressions Causes Weirdness
Recently we needed to set one of our Apache servers to output a HTTP header for a specific URL, a simple task right? Well it turns out it can be a right pain... The server is pretty standard,...
Hunting For Zombie Pods
At almost exactly 0300 (UTC) on the morning of 22/05 our monitoring systems started sending alerts for a handful of websites. They had begun to respond slower. This was very strange, the sites...
Satis Queue Worker
As part of a recent server migration we had to move a Satis instance. The server it was being moved from was a baremetal server, the server it was going to was a Kubernetes cluster, quite...