A key part of any modern infrastructure is good monitoring, even on my local desktop system I like to have monitoring in place so that if a problem gradually builds up I can trace where it started.

Unfortunately in this case the monitoring system actually caused the problem and Prometheus was using up all my system CPU and RAM.

Website developers (like myself) often end up with a few websites we support - whether these are promoting a business, running a blog, for a side project, or a site for a friend or hobby.

Since these are often low to no budget and can’t be prioritised for work at busy times they need to be

• cheap
• low maintenance
• easy to set up
• blazingly fast

I’ve been working with SQL databases for over 20 years but this year was my first time using a NoSQL database.

Previous conversations with developers often went along the lines of them trying to tell me NoSQL is “better” and me not quite seeing a benefit. At the time I never really had a reason to try something different - what I had worked and was low risk.

Recently I had cause to adopt Google’s Firebase hosting and Cloud Firestore database and this is what I learned.

In the world of Web development the words “Best Practice” are often thrown about as if implementation was a trivial detail and giving the impression that everyone else must be doing all this already.

Then you implement these and find that it isn’t so trivial - especially when you try and combine each practice.

I wanted to experiment with making this site into a Progressive Web App (PWA) while maintaining good security through Content Security Policy (CSP) headers and long cache times for static assets.

Hugo - The world’s fastest framework for building websites is pretty awesome. It’s what I use to manage this site.

But much of the web development world has moved in the direction of JavaScript, npm, and Webpack.

So how can you run a Hugo website and manage the embedded JavaScript and CSS that are most commonly managed with npm and Webpack?

One of the things I love about the web is the flexibility it brings.

How I see this site may not be how you see it - and maybe you don’t see it at all but are using a screen reader.

Supporting old technologies is frustrating for web developers, we all want to use new features and the latest tools.

“Only” 5% of website traffic is coming from people using Internet Explorer

Even Microsoft say people should upgrade

Supporting additional browsers costs time and money.

Why should we do it ?

How did I balance all the other requirements of a website with the need to minimise energy use?

To make this site cleaner than 98% of web pages tested

Part of what makes the web so brilliant is in it’s flexibility - the information is conveyed mostly in digital text and unlike paper we don’t all have to experience that in the same way.

Some people can’t see the images in a website so we can add “alt” text which replaces the image for these people.

The problem comes when the image doesn’t actually have a meaning - then what should the Alternative text be?

I was recently updating a very old laptop for use in some network testing - all it needs to do is connect to wifi.

I couldn’t understand why I was getting a blank screen after grub loaded

I tried various install media, tried editing grub conf.

The best I could get was a screen saying

Booting a command list