Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Blocking SEO & “Competitor Research” Bots

by Jason Stewart
I recently noticed that “competitor research” and “SEO” bots were accounting for almost 60% of the traffic on my webserver. Here were the worst offenders: trendiction.com (trendictionbot) User Agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; trendictionbot0.5.0; trendiction search; http://www.trendiction.de/bot; please let us know of any problems; web at trendiction.com) Gecko/20170101 Firefox/67.0" Network(s) – 144.76.0.0/16 (Hetzner […]

Tweaking WordPress

by Jason Stewart
Disable Emoji Processing Sometimes WordPress translates special characters into images when I want those characters left alone. After a little digging, I learned that this was being done by the emoji translation scripts. First I tried disabling this feature from the admin panel, but the characters were still being converted. Disabling the translation scripts in […]

Favorite Free Monospace Fonts for Programming

by Jason Stewart
Most people prefer monospaced fonts for programming. A monospaced font is a font in which all characters have the same width. Such characters make it easy to vertically align variables, data, and other syntax structures for easier reading and comprehension. Here is my running list of favorites: Try Them Out!

Make Things Easier to Read With Accessibility Bookmarklets

by Jason Stewart
HAPPPY IT!beta I recently ran across a website called HAPPPY IT!beta which creates a JavaScript bookmarklet for your bookmarks bar. When activated, this bookmarklet will change all of the fonts for the current website to Comic Sans when you click the bookmark. As goofy as it seems, the general idea can be put to good […]

Web Font Tips

by Jason Stewart
Back in the good old days, when we walked five miles to school in the blisterin’ heat and the freezin’ rain, we didn’t have web fonts, and we liked it! We made our web pages with Front Page in Comic Sans the way God intended. Then them big-city hipsters came along with their crazy ideas […]

Absolute Best Vim Tips

by Jason Stewart
Escape Key Substitutes Clipboard Editing HTML Unlocking Whitespace Conversion Bash makeand Makefiles Plugins Cheat Sheet Vim Escape Key Substitutes Constantly reaching for the Esc key is very uncomfortable on a typical 101-key desktop PC keyboard. Having an Esc alternative vastly improves the Vim experience for most desktop users. Any of the following key combinations will […]

Proposal: Optional Safe Web Mode for Enhanced Privacy and Security

by Jason Stewart
Expected to get more traction on this. Perhaps my writing needs improvement…

Browser + (TOR/Proxy/etc): Not Very Private

by Jason Stewart
In the dark old days of not long ago, most web-based interactive content was delivered via ActiveX or NPAPI browser plug-ins (ex: Java, Flash, etc.).  The danger of browser plug-ins is that once installed, they can do just about anything with your computer (read files, install viruses, alter system files, etc.). With the rise of […]

ISP Quietly Kills E-Mail Security

by Jason Stewart
To encrypt the transmission of e-mail from our e-mail clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail, iMail, iPhone Mail, Android Mail, etc.) to our e-mail servers, many of us (whether we know it or not) are using STARTTLS. STARTTLS is a way for clear text communication protocols to “upgrade” to a secured connection.  If client and server […]

SSL/TLS Security Theater

by Jason Stewart
Thanks to the recent NSA/Snowden allegations, all of the major websites have been sending every picture, post, and tweet over “secure” HTTP (HTTP/S).  This particular usage of HTTP/S is FAANG moat-making, and security theater. HTTP/S only secures a connection between two endpoints.  An endpoint would be a device (like your phone or desktop) or a […]

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