Coding

Yesterday, I was checking the performance of one of my sites with GTmetrix and Pingdom tools. Although my site takes about 1 second to open in any browser, the tools were reporting remove query strings from static resources warning. Anything that follows after the question mark i.e “?” is called a query string. You’ll find URLs with query strings on dynamic sites. If the site serves static content, it doesn’t make sense to use them. The website I’m talking about is a small blog. Hence, I decided to get rid of the warning. ...

As mentioned in my earlier blog post, I am using LetsEncrypt free SSL certificate on one of my sites. The certificate was due to expire in few weeks. The CertBot dispatched an alert message for the same on my official email address. As I’m using SSL for the first time and having several doubts in mind, I decided to renew LetsEncrypt certificate immediately. I fired the following command in the Linux terminal (10 days prior the certificate’s expiry date) and restarted Nginx. ...

After Google declared HTTPS as a ranking signal, thousands of sites have switched to HTTPS from HTTP. To secure your site with HTTPS, you must install an SSL certificate on the server and configure the web server to redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS. Before Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority was launched in 2016, companies used to charge a hefty amount for providing SSL certificates. Now, you can easily get free SSL certificates to secure your personal or business portal, thanks to Let’s Encrypt. ...

If your app is appending the errors and website visitor’s IP address, browser data, etc to a log file, you should manually archive old log files or use Logrotate. If you don’t do so, the server will run out of storage memory and your application may crash. Logrotate is a powerful program that archives and removes old log files. It saves heaps of storage memory by automatically compressing log files generated by Apache, NGINX, MySQL, etc. ...

According to Google, HTTPS is a ranking signal. If you make your website secure by configuring the web server to deliver HTTPS pages, your site may rank higher than an HTTP only portal. More importantly, web browsers have begun to warn their users of non-secure web pages. The Google Chrome browser (version 56) marks non-https website pages as insecure when they have an HTML field for entering passwords, credit or debit card details, etc. ...

Setting a preferred domain is one of the most important things to do after launching a new site. It takes few seconds to set a PD. Before setting a preferred domain, you should make sure that Google indexes only the URLS which you want to appear in search results. To do so, you must set up a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect will prevent duplicate content issues. It will tell search engines that they should index the correct web pages. ...

Nginx is one of the world’s most powerful web servers. It has a robust caching system which eliminates the need for optimizing websites with third-party caching solutions. While managing your website, you may come across the strange error called No Space Left on Device while reading upstream. You won’t know that Nginx is throwing the “No Space Left error” until you check the HTTP response header or go through the log files. To see the response header, install the Redirect Path Chrome extension or use the online redirect checker tool. ...

HTTPS protocol makes your website secure. Google had declared HTTPS as a ranking signal last year which means that secure sites can have higher organic visibility than nonsecure websites. If your site is selling products online, you’ll see a boost in conversion because the browsers will mark your website as safe. Before you go ahead and enable HTTPS on your website, you must learn the Google Content Guidelines. Once you enable HTTP secure protocol, Google will crawl and index all HTTPS URLS it finds on your website. It then checks the HTTP version of the URLS to learn whether the webmaster has implemented proper redirects or not. ...

I was recently sent an article titled ‘How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016’. Aguinaga, J. (2016). It is a somewhat amusing take on the current state of JavaScript frameworks and libraries available to web developers and how this environment is changing so quickly. All quirks aside, modern application frameworks provide us with much interactivity and web functionality we take for granted. The modern web browser has to cope with these advancements and continue to evolve to meet the demands of its users and developers. In the Federal government and other organizations that are not able to update their software systems to keep up with the pace, libraries called polyfills have been created to add functionality to legacy browsers that were never designed to run such rich modern web applications. Modernizr is one of the most popular HTML5 polyfills available as open source software at https://github.com/Modernizr. ...

Web hosting is the backbone of a website. It is crucial to the success of a blogger, business, and the website. A poor web hosting firm will have big downtimes. Because of poor infrastructure, the network latency will be high and your site will rank below faster websites in the search engines. Web hosting services are of three types, shared, VPS, dedicated, and cloud. The shared hosting plans are the cheapest of the three. They are ideal for small sites owned by newbie webmasters and beginners. VPS and dedicated plans are costly as compared to shared. They are suitable for business or larger websites owned by experienced webmasters. Cloud platforms are suitable for websites whose traffic may explode anytime. ...