How do you monitor website performance? Is it monitored? Do you know if your website is getting faster? Slower? Do you know when it falls below critical performance thresholds? Are you receiving automated alerts? Do you even have alerts? If not, you could be. And it won’t cost you a dime to get started.

This post is going to talk about SpeedTracker. SpeedTracker is a free tool that allows you to monitor website performance over time. Use it to visualize your page speed scores, track Lighthouse metrics, receive alerts and even create a public dashboard consisting of multiple websites for quick reference.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine since it was introduced to me by a colleague in Chicago. This was before I was able to close my Google account but some time after losing hundreds of photos leaving Facebook. And though I was aware DuckDuckGo maintains a hidden service for Tor users it wasn’t until recently I felt confident enough with my OS security to safely use it.

Rather than just bookmarking and using the DDG onion site, however, I decided to leverage some of the nifty URL params they’ve made available. Following is a quick rundown of the URL params I’m using to customize my DDG search experience for use with Tor. In After Dark fashion I’ve decided to name them “DarkDuckGo”.

Okay so I was trying to upgrade to the latest version of Hugo today on macOS and didn’t have the time nor the patience to read man brew again.

tldr brew didn’t show how to install a specific version of a formula so I did what any reasonable person would do and read Jake Trent’s downgrading post so I knew how to go back after an upgrade.

Then I ran a brew upgrade hugo to get the latest Hugo version…

If you’re looking to measure page view events in your Redux app – even if you’re not using the de facto community routers – I found an approach which can be modified to emit analytics events to a number of different providers with relative ease using a single middleware integration.

Working on SEO and need to find out which keywords to optimize for? Need ideas keyword changes? The AdWords Keyword Tool ought to help.

Recently while Googling Olla de Carne (Costa Rican beef stew) my browser was  hijacked after taking a search results link. Rather than receiving a list of ingredients, the link redirected the browser to a bogus antivirus site that mimicked Windows and faked an integrated Explorer virus scan. Let’s examine how it happened.

The user agent string, a piece of data transmitted in the HTTP header during a web request, contains information valuable in determining browser type and often basic system information.

Example user agent string sent from a web browser during an HTTP request:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.89 Safari/532.5

The above example, for instance, provides information such as browser and browser version, user locale (language), OS, system architecture and the layout engine used. When authoring documents for the Web, information from the user agent string can be valuable in determining how best to mark-up documents.

Getting the information is easy.