Blog (page 2)

I've been asked about the practicalities of getting into contracting a few times lately so, in order to stop copy/pasting this from email to email, I've turned it into this blog post.

As revealed in a series of posts by UpGuard, AggregateIQ - Cambridge Analytica's "digital" partner - weren't exactly 1337 HAX0R D00DZ; they left their source code repos full of config data and API keys behind an open signup.

Tracking on the web is pervasive but by using a selection of browsers on Android it's possible to mitigate the main effects of this to enhance your privacy. This is an outline of the set-up I currently use which offers different options on the privacy-convenience spectrum whilst still being easy to use in practice.

In making the switch to HTTP2 I noticed a (possible) improvement in performance. Alan Murray asked the question of how much of the improvement is due to the binary format and how much was due to multiplexing.

Some items I've found interesting recently.

As one of my articles is the number one result for a search term Google has extracted the relevant information into a featured snippet. I was updating the data and used it as an opportunity to see how quickly Google would update the snippet.

In my review of the effect of HTTP2 on performance I mentioned that the result wasn't statistically significant. Jim Newbery looked at the numbers and said that the result did fit the criteria for statistical significance. He was correct and I had got my sums wrong but in checking my work I found something else.

A recent upgrade to my hosting enabled HTTP2 so I took the opportunity to see how this change affected performance of my site.

Some technology related items I've read and favourited in Pocket recently.

The new - and long overdue - Google Webmaster Tools console features the one report we really wanted but didn't have: the index status of pages on a site. Previously it's been possible to piece together a reasonable assessment of this data by a process that essentially amounted to divination but now we have access to data.