Web
Guides on the building blocks of the modern web. Regular expressions, URL encoding, slugs, color formats, and more - practical knowledge for frontend and backend developers alike.
llms.txt After Eighteen Months: What the Request Logs Show
Adoption reached 10% of domains, but AI crawlers fetched llms.txt 408 times across 500M visits. The evidence, the audience that does read it, and what to ship.
Your Link Preview Is Broken Because the Crawler Never Saw the Page
Blank or wrong link previews are usually a crawler problem, not a tag problem: bot protection, client-side rendering, WebP images - and how to reproduce it.
Same Lightness, 12× the Brightness: HSL vs OKLCH
At HSL lightness 50% the measured luminance swings 12.9x across hue. At OKLCH lightness 0.62 it swings 1.2x. Here is the maths, and what it costs you.
Catastrophic Backtracking: How One Regex Can Take Your Site Down
What ReDoS is, why backtracking engines explode exponentially, how to spot vulnerable patterns before an attacker does, and the fixes that work.
GEO in 2026: Getting Cited by AI Answer Engines
Generative Engine Optimisation for developers: llms.txt, AI-crawler access, content chunking, citation density and measuring share of voice.
AI Is Eating Search. These SEO Fundamentals Still Win.
AI answer engines changed discovery, but titles, canonicals, sitemaps and structured data matter more than ever. What changed, and what gets neglected.
Rich Text to Markdown: How to Convert Google Docs, Word, and Notion Cleanly
Practical guide to converting rich text and HTML to clean Markdown. What survives, what breaks, source-specific quirks, and how to clean up the output.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript Minification: Complete Guide to Benefits, Risks and Best Practices
What minifiers actually remove, the real size savings, common breakage patterns, source maps, and when minification is simply not worth doing.
JSON-LD in 2026: Which Schema.org Types Actually Matter and Which Are a Waste of Time
Which Schema.org types trigger Google rich results and which you can ignore: the supported list, ROI by type, and how to prioritise your markup.
Structured Data for Developers: JSON-LD, Schema.org, and Rich Results in Google
Implementing Article, FAQ, HowTo, Product and BreadcrumbList schema with JSON-LD, with examples in PHP and Next.js, plus testing and CI validation.
SEO for AI Search: How to Optimise for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
How AI answer engines discover, evaluate and cite content - and how to optimise pages for ChatGPT Browse, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Image to Base64 Data URIs: When to Inline and When Not To
The data URI format, size overhead, caching and CSP implications - and clear rules for when inlining an image as Base64 helps rather than hurts.
Open Graph Meta Tags: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Set Them Up
Required properties, type-specific tags, Twitter Card fallback, image specs per platform, cache invalidation, and what breaks link previews.
The Developer's Meta Tag Checklist: SEO, Social Sharing, and Beyond
Every meta tag that matters: title, description, canonical, robots, Open Graph, Twitter Cards, structured data, hreflang - and how to audit them in CI.
Markdown Syntax Reference: CommonMark, GFM, and the Gotchas
A full Markdown reference: CommonMark, GitHub Flavored extensions like tables and task lists, escaping rules and platform rendering differences.
HEX, RGB, HSL, HSV: Colour Formats Every Developer Should Know
HEX encoding, RGB channels, HSL vs HSV, alpha channels, sRGB vs linear colour spaces and the conversion formulas, for CSS and image processing.
URL Slugs: Rules, SEO Impact, and Transliteration
What makes a good URL slug, how slugification works, Unicode transliteration for non-Latin scripts, and Google's rules - with code patterns.
Regular Expressions: Practical Guide with 20 Ready-to-Use Patterns
Regex fundamentals, flags, groups and lookaheads, 20 tested patterns, plus the Unicode, trailing-newline and engine differences that silently break them.
Three Threads: Search, Markup, and Getting Bytes Down
The search thread is the largest, and it has shifted. Answer engines now sit between your page and a chunk of its readers, which is what AI is eating search and SEO for AI search are about. GEO goes further into llms.txt, crawler access and citation density. The unglamorous groundwork still decides most outcomes: the meta tag checklist covers every tag worth setting and how to audit them in CI, and URL slugs covers transliteration and the stability rules that stop you needing redirects later.
Structured data is its own sub-thread, and the honest version is that most of it does nothing. Which Schema.org types actually matter separates the handful Google renders from the 800 it ignores, while the implementation guide and Open Graph tags cover the markup itself. Check your work with the meta tag analyser, JSON-LD generator and social preview tool.
The markup and text thread covers what you write rather than how it ranks: the Markdown reference for CommonMark versus GFM differences, rich text conversion for escaping Google Docs and Notion cleanly, and colour formats for HEX, RGB, HSL and HSV.
The performance thread is short and practical. Minification covers real savings and real breakage, and Base64 data URIs gives clear rules for when inlining an image helps and when it costs you caching. Regex deserves a warning of its own: the pattern guide for everyday use, and catastrophic backtracking for the pattern that takes a site down. Test yours in the regex tester.