Web Development

Building for the web: HTTP, browsers, front-end and back-end notes, and the standards that quietly changed under our feet.

198 posts on Web Development.

2026-06

2026-06-04 Running HTTP/3 with Caddy in 2026: it just works
2026-06-03 QUIC and HTTP/3 in 2026: from Google experiment to IETF standard
2026-06-02 Serving HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 with Nginx in 2026
2026-06-02 Caching get_certificate lookups in Caddy

2026-04

2026-04-28 Finding Dutch audio across streaming services

2026-03

2026-03-06 How we implemented a mobile-friendly Oh Dear UI with AI

2026-01

2026-01-03 Web development is fun again

2022-09

2022-09-29 Oh Dear 2.0 launched

2020-06

2020-06-09 How do we find users for our SaaS?

2020-05

2020-05-25 What else can you stuff in a certificate chain?
2020-05-03 Selecting all checkboxes on a page with the Developer Console

2020-04

2020-04-29 Build & test your Laravel project via Bitbucket Pipelines
2020-04-26 Set up a custom 404 page for static sites with Caddy 2
2020-04-21 Someone, somewhere, is trying to break into your app
2020-04-10 How to run HTTP/3 with Caddy 2
2020-04-10 Migrating to Caddy 2

2020-03

2020-03-09 Forcing a Content-Type header with Guzzle's form_params

2020-02

2020-02-27 I found a loophole to prevent those pesky cookie notices 👀
2020-02-26 Adding a sticky table of contents in Hugo to posts

2019-12

2019-12-20 Making a JSON prettifier in pure JavaScript
2019-12-01 cron.weekly is coming back!

2019-11

2019-11-25 A Caddyfile config example for Laravel
2019-11-21 Remove index.php from the URL in Laravel
2019-11-20 How to prevent content-spoofing in Apache's 404 error pages
2019-11-12 A step-by-step guide on migrating from WordPress to Hugo
2019-11-06 A fresh new look for this site
2019-11-05 A Linux sysadmin's guide to moving to a new website

2019-10

2019-10-09 Chrome’s next steps for security: mixed content checking more important than ever

2019-09

2019-07

2019-07-10 Trigger an on demand uptime & broken links check after a deploy with the Oh Dear! API

2019-05

2019-05-27 Some useful changes to the Oh Dear! monitoring service

2019-04

2019-04-08 Lazily load below-the-fold images and iframes
2019-04-06 Using Oh Dear! to keep your Varnish cache warm

2018-11

2018-11-11 HTTP-over-QUIC will officially become HTTP/3

2018-09

2018-09-11 Indie Hackers interview with Oh Dear!
2018-09-07 Chrome stops showing “www”-prefix in URI

2018-04

2018-04-30 Certificate Transparency logging now mandatory
2018-04-30 Chalk Talk #3: how to optimise your content for Varnish
2018-04-16 Upcoming presentation at LOADays: Varnish Internals – Speeding up a site x100
2018-04-06 Chalk Talk #2: how does Varnish work?
2018-04-03 Varnish: same hash, different results? Check the Vary header!

2018-03

2018-03-28 Drupal core – Highly critical – Remote Code Execution – SA-CORE-2018-002
2018-03-25 Chalk Talk #1: An introduction to Varnish
2018-03-22 Upcoming Drupal 7 and 8 core highly critical security release: March 28th
2018-03-15 Varnish 6.0 released

2018-02

2018-02-24 Announcing “Oh Dear!”: a new innovative tool to monitor your websites
2018-02-19 Show IDN punycode in Firefox to avoid phishing URLs
2018-02-13 Nginx adds support for HTTP/2 Server-Side Push
2018-02-09 Chrome will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”

2018-01

2018-01-16 Mozilla Firefox to require HTTPS in order to use latest features

2017-09

2017-09-17 Chrome & Firefox now force .dev domains to HTTPS via preloaded HSTS
2017-09-10 Coming soon: Oh Dear! – Monitoring for the encrypted web

2017-08

2017-08-28 Restore one-click certificate viewing in Chrome

2017-07

2017-07-18 Apache httpd 2.2.15-60: underscores in hostnames are now blocked
2017-07-04 Podcast: Caching using Varnish

2017-05

2017-05-31 HTTP/2 push is tougher than I thought
2017-05-08 Chrome to restore one-click certificate viewing in browser

2017-04

2017-04-28 Top 5 security checks for secure, unhackable web applications
2017-04-11 Nginx might have 33% market share, Apache isn’t falling below 50%

2017-03

2017-03-09 Drupal 7.x Services module unserialize() to Remote Code Execution

2017-02

2017-02-24 Cloudbleed: Cloudflare Reverse Proxies have Dumped Uninitialized Memory
2017-02-18 HTML & CSS Is Hard: A friendly web development tutorial
2017-02-12 IETF Draft: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over multicast QUIC
2017-02-08 Server-side timings in the Chrome Devtools
2017-02-06 Brotli compression saves 1.5 petabytes per day at Google’s Play Store
2017-02-01 Standardising the “URL”

2017-01

2017-01-31 Implementing “Save For Offline” with Service Workers in the Browser
2017-01-29 A change of RSS feeds
2017-01-27 Chrome 56 Will Aggressively Throttle Background Tabs

2016-11

2016-11-07 Apache HTTP authentication in .htaccess

2016-10

2016-10-20 Varnish Explained

2016-08

2016-08-01 Chrome 52: return old backspace behaviour

2016-07

2016-07-30 Google's QUIC protocol: moving the web from TCP to UDP
2016-07-29 Enable QUIC protocol in Google Chrome
2016-07-25 A new website layout, focussed on speed and simplicity

2016-06

2016-06-23 Podcast: curl, libcurl and the future of the web

2016-05

2016-05-14 The day Google Chrome disables HTTP/2 for nearly everyone: May 31st, 2016

2016-04

2016-04-26 Nginx 1.10 brings HTTP/2 support to the stable releases
2016-04-11 Video: HTTP/2 for PHP Developers at FOSDEM 2016

2016-03

2016-02

2016-02-01 Slides: HTTP/2 for PHP developers

2016-01

2016-01-31 A clean mailing list browser, focussing on readability

2015-12

2015-12-31 Podcast: Delving into HTTP/2

2015-11

2015-11-16 Chrome drops NPN support for HTTP/2, ALPN only
2015-11-06 Simulate low-bandwidth conditions with Chrome’s network throttling

2015-10

2015-10-21 Firefox Nightly starts marking login-forms in HTTP as insecure
2015-10-15 A Distributed Web
2015-10-08 25% of all websites are about to get a REST API

2015-09

2015-09-22 Enable HTTP/2 in Nginx
2015-09-06 New presentation: HTTP/2: The Next Version of the Internet

2015-08

2015-08-13 The Hidden “Refresh” Menu in Chrome when Developer Tools Are Opened
2015-08-09 What happens to a new URL the first 10 minutes on the internet?
2015-08-09 Block User-Agent in htaccess for Apache Webserver

2015-07

2015-06

2015-06-15 uBlock Origin Now Blocking Access To SourceForge
2015-06-14 HHVM Performance Lockdown: Is HHVM Reaching Its Limit?

2015-05

2015-05-15 Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2): RFC7540
2015-05-06 uBlock Origin
2015-05-04 What's The Value Of Owning A Browser?
2015-05-02 Using Webserver Access Logs As A Database Storage System

2015-04

2015-04-27 Drupal EngineHack Detection Website
2015-04-21 Using JavaScript To Read L3 CPU Cache
2015-04-21 Magento eCommerce PHP Remote Code Execution
2015-04-17 Double-clicking On The Web
2015-04-16 HTTP/1 vs HTTP/2 Page Loading
2015-04-14 Nginx HTTP/2 Support Coming Late 2015
2015-04-08 When Mailing Lists Turn Into Online Forums

2015-03

2015-03-23 When Private Browsing Isn’t Private On iOS: HTML5 And AirPlay
2015-03-10 Virtual Reality As The Next Step After Reponsive Webdesign?

2015-02

2015-02-24 Firefox 36 Fully Supports HTTP/2 Standard
2015-02-18 HTTP/2 Specification Is Final
2015-02-17 Giving HTTPie a Chance
2015-02-09 Service Side Push in HTTP/2 With nghttp2

2015-01

2015-01-21 Meet Microsoft’s Project Spartan, The New IE6
2015-01-20 Security Panel Lands In Firefox 37
2015-01-15 Does SPDY (or HTTP/2) Actually Help?
2015-01-12 Enable HTTP/2 support in Chrome
2015-01-10 View the HTTP/SPDY/HTTP2 Protocol in Google Chrome
2015-01-06 Architecting Websites For The HTTP/2 Era

2014-12

2014-12-29 The Infinite File Downloader
2014-12-26 Undoing Years of Optimisations With HTTP/2
2014-12-23 The Surprising Mixed Content Handling on SSL/HTTPS Enabled Websites
2014-12-16 Enable SPDY in Nginx on CentOS 6

2014-11

2014-11-28 Drupal 7.33 performance penalty
2014-11-27 Test Gzip Compression of Site via Curl
2014-11-23 Presentation: Mobile Zabbix, Why Mobile Matters (MoZBX)
2014-11-18 Make HTTPerf use a proxy for connections
2014-11-17 REST API best practices and versioning
2014-11-10 Firefox Developer Edition released

2014-08

2014-08-07 HHVM versus PHP-FPM 5.4 vs PHP-FPM 5.5: performance comparison

2014-07

2014-07-28 HTTPd: Cannot load mod_status.so into server: undefined symbol: ap_copy_scoreboard_worker

2014-04

2014-04-22 Debugging HTTP requests to PHP via the CLI

2012-11

2012-11-27 Stop. Caching. Static. Files. In. Varnish.

2012-07

2012-07-06 My thoughts on mobile webdesign

2012-06

2012-04

2012-04-20 MySQL error: table is marked as crashed and should be repaired

2012-02

2012-01

2012-01-21 WordPress plugin: undo the default WordPress formatting (single/double quotes/dashes)

2011-12

2011-12-11 Enabling and disabling PHP’s APC cache on a per Virtual Host level in Apache
2011-12-11 Apache Access Log: don’t log static content

2011-10

2011-10-17 Akismet letting you down? Try a simple math question.

2011-07

2011-07-31 Latest tool: QuickDiff – visually showing the differences between text
2011-07-28 MySQL: table is read-only
2011-07-03 Finished a draft Varnish 3.0 VCL for Fork CMS

2011-03

2011-03-30 How is facebook tracking our (outgoing) URLs?
2011-03-13 Firefox extension: the 'Shortlink Revealer' (bit.ly exposer – Proof of Concept)
2011-03-11 Getting started with Git: linkpost
2011-03-03 Profiling: Learning from Engadget's infrastructure on traffic spike handling (ie: iPad2 launch)

2011-01

2011-01-26 Plesk throws “A mandatory extension policy in the request is not accepted by the server for this resource.”

2010-08

2010-08-23 WordPress v3.1, v3.2: Don’t Replace (Double & Single) Dashes & (Double & Single) Quotes!
2010-08-14 Facebook’s Techtalks Worth Watching

2009-07

2009-07-22 “See Pricing”, Your Marketing Tip Of The Week!
2009-07-01 Get It While It’s Hot: FireFox 3.5

2009-05

2009-05-30 “Are we in control of our own decisions?”
2009-05-11 Running IE6, IE7, IE8, FF 2, FF 3, Chrome, Opera & Safari

2009-04

2009-04-29 Webcast: Database Sharding at Netlog with MySQL and PHP

2009-03

2009-03-07 ‘php_admin_value’ Bug When Overwriting PHP Settings

2008-12

2008-12-22 Save Bandwidth – Enable GZip Compression In PHP

2008-11

2008-11-29 Get Rid Of The ‘WWW’ Prefix – It’s Long Overdue
2008-11-22 Google’s Chrome Won’t Hurt IE – Only FireFox
2008-11-09 System Calls In Apache (Linux) vs IIS (Windows)
2008-11-07 Plesk Site Preview Not Working

2008-10

2008-10-19 Reading A .FLV File From Flash – Not Working Because Of Missing MIME Type
2008-10-18 Fennec Alpha – Just Like The Other Fox

2008-09

2008-09-30 Restyling – For Better Or For Worse
2008-09-10 Memory Leak In Google Analytics – Blame Canada?
2008-09-09 A Recipe For Disaster: XSS, Google-Analytics.com And DNS Cache Poisoning

2008-08

2008-08-28 There Are HTTP Headers, And Then There Are HTTP Headers
2008-08-27 Multiple Headers With Same Name Causing Errors In IIS
2008-08-25 “_gat is not defined” Google Analytics Error
2008-08-23 The Right SQL User, For The Right Job
2008-08-22 New Boyscouts Website Launched
2008-08-21 Setting Maximum Width For Image In IE6, IE7 & Firefox
2008-08-18 Using Conditional CSS Stylesheets For Easier Maintenance
2008-08-16 404 Week At Google’s Blog, Time To Fix Your Headers!
2008-08-10 Using GoogleBot’s User Agent In Your Advantage

2008-07

2008-07-30 Using Proper Header Redirects In PHP

2008-06

2008-06-23 Update: seo analyzer v0.3
2008-06-22 Ajax’s death struggle?
2008-06-21 Some must-have cheat papers for designers & programmers
2008-06-19 Beta-launch: seo analyzer V0.2
2008-06-15 Learn from the best at Google Code University
2008-06-13 A technical look at Myspace’s growth
2008-06-08 Some terrible (truely terrible) captcha’s
2008-06-08 Grandfather builds webbrowser for autistic boy