Completely Hiding The Wordpress Version Is Hard
We develop and maintain a couple of WordPress sites. There are a number of things we will do as standard to secure each site. One of these is running WPScan. It checks for all kinds of things but...
Automatically Find The Best Image Compression
Recently I was tweaking the default quality values used to compress images on one of our sites. The quality value is a number between 0 and 100. 100 produces a large file size and has high...
Data Transfer Objects In PHP 8
Data transfer objects (DTOs for short) are simple PHP classes which have one job: Store some data. Until recently the spatie/data-transfer-object package was our go-to when creating DTOs. This...
Image Compression For High DPR Images
Images typically account for 40% of the size of a webpage. This makes them a key thing to look at when optimising a site. Image optimisation typically involves resizing and compressing it to be as...
Storing Multi Currency Prices In Laravel
Recently I was involved with building a new module for our internal Intranet. It is responsible for storing all the details of our subscriptions; name, start/end dates, price, notes... All simple...
Image Focal Point Auto Detection
A recent trend with CMSes is to do focal point based media cropping. Traditionally an image is uploaded and then is cropped/scaled to the required size, eg a thumbnail. The problem is that crops...
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...
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...
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...
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...