WebDev

I recently found time to watch a very insightful, fast-paced presentation by Adam Argyle titled “25 New & Rad Features of CSS”.

After just five minutes, when he demonstrated the use case of @view-transition { navigation: auto; } and the whole crowd reacted positively, I was hooked and watched until the end.

I learned a great deal and implemented many of the features mentioned in my websites. Some of them I had heard of before, but I am not keen to implement everything straight away. When technologies are still at the early stage of adoption in web browsers, I tend to wait. The problem is that later I often forget about them, which is why Adam’s presentation reminded me of some of the concepts I had already come across.

One of these was the use of color-scheme: light dark; and the light-dark() syntax approach for light and dark colours.

Back in 2023, I have looked at how to add relevant hreflang tags to my personal website, which considered adding self-reference to the current language, reference to a translated page (if available), and falling back with x-default to a page that is designed as a language switcher page.

Since then, I thought that this approach was correct, but found out that this solution, on my website, where not all content is 100% translated, is not good for sites fully translated by default.

Here is how I learned from it and how I optimised hreflang and x-default on websites built with Hugo.

When I developed my Minimal Google Analytics 4 snippet, I thought about preventing it from being blocked by various AdBlockers.

Along with AdBlock Plus, I am also using the DuckDuckGo Privacy Protection extension in Safari. I am using the DuckDuckGo browser on its own as well.

DuckDuckGo, along with restrictive ad blockers, tends to block requests heading to the google-analytics.com domain. This is done on purpose, and I fully understand that.

This is why I described mitigation techniques (Minimal Analytics 4 - masking (hiding) requests).

This technique allows you to utilize Redirect 200 to mask requests to external domains under your domain.

By implementing a redirect as follows:

/g/collect https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect 200

Instead of calling the address below in a script

https://www.google-analytics.com/g/collect

I am calling this

https://www.example.com/g/collect

Behind the scenes, thanks to Redirect 200, I am sending requests to Google Analytics that are not blocked by either AdBlock Plus or DuckDuckGo.

This solution, however, has 2 major flaws.

Recently, I have been in contact with several people who have been thanking me for posting articles that have helped them significantly with their technological struggles or in easing their issues.

Some of them have been so happy that they would like to know how to donate a bit to support the cause. While this gesture is appreciated, most of the activities on my site are non-profit.

I used to have ads displayed on my website when it was hosted on WordPress. However, after migrating to Hugo, I soon realized that despite the speed benefits, the web performance was being compromised due to ads served through Google AdSense.

I managed to significantly reduce the costs for my website, so I decided to take the step of removing ads altogether, and I have been happy with this decision.

The great thing about Hugo, a static site generator, is that it got a lot of options for customisation and more are constantly added.

There are templates embedded into it, but they can be easily overridden by custom templates, like headings, through render hooks.

Recently I wrote about how to Publish your content in Google News on Android, iOS and news.google.com. Looking further I checked if there is such an option in other search engines like… Bing.

Bing is also offering aggregated News in Bing News along with serving this through integration into the Windows operating system.

Users can get their personalized content through Bing and Microsoft Start, Windows, Edge and Office.

Setting a hreflang meta tag on your multilingual website shall be as simple as a piece of cake. Just put the relevant meta tag on your website, refer to the translated version and on translated version refer back to the original one.

Looks as simple as that. End of story? Wrong!

My post about Bing Jail gained a bit of attention (a lot!). With the traction, there is hate, but I could expect that as well. There was a bit of conversation in the comments on Hacker News which gives me valuable feedback.

This short, post scriptum post is not an explanation but rather my experience on the following days. My site reappear in Bing search for one day to be manually removed (blocked) the day after where Bing Support, who surprisingly responded, start looking into the case.

My personal site has been recently penalized by Bing, or if you prefer different naming for it - secretly blacklisted or shadowbanned. Don’t know exactly why but by the end of January 2023 I lost every indexed page that had been in Bing.

Recently I have been annoyed when my weekly WebPerformance Report email from WebPageTest shows a failure on Compress Transfer.

This failure, reported in red was done by just one small file… favicon.ico.