Web-Performance Blog
I am a free customer of Freshping service. Since yesterday evening July 9th, 2024, my integration with pushover.net using a webhook has stopped working, and I couldn’t find any way to fix it. My integration remains present, and the configuration appears to be correct. However, webhooks seem not to be sending out notifications. Due to the announced service change, I do not qualify for support anymore as a free user.
There might be times when you want to closely follow updates to a public GitHub repository. I had this use case in June 2024 when following the Swiss NCSC for cyber threat information regarding DDoS attacks.
I solved this problem by setting up an API key and regularly querying the main branch commits. However, this process is unnecessarily complex. A much easier way is to follow a repository as an RSS feed.
In today’s digital marketing world, tracking how ads perform is crucial. Google has been helping advertisers track ad performance using something called GLCID. Recently, Google introduced two new tools called WBRAID and GBRAID. These changes are due to new privacy rules from Apple, and they help advertisers see how effective their ads are without compromising user privacy.
I familiarized myself with the “Leitfaden für Behördenanfragen zu Kundeninformationen und -inhalten” which was created by Swico to guide Swiss hosting providers on handling inquiries from Swiss authorities and courts regarding customer activities, information, and content.
This is a quick snippet, a view onto a Statuscake response time graph. A web application had a memory leak, and over multiple days, the response time was building up on instance 1. If instance 2 is queried, the response time is good; instance 1 had the memory leak and would cause the response time to build up.
There is nothing to learn here, but this graph speaks for itself and looks rather beautiful. It shows an extremely rare and very visible error.
I have used this software for my netbooks that always failed to download the Windows update. I was able to extend the useful life of the device for years. This tool may not be very corporate-ready, but if you have a Windows device and you need to update it offline and easily, this can be a lifesaver.
Please download from the original source, a German website.
https://www.heise.de/download/product/wsus-offline-update-ct-offline-update-38170
This is my small mirror, but it may not be updated to the latest version. Therefore, please refrain from downloading from here unless necessary.
The new Azure updates went live around the end of November 2024 and has also enabled RSS feeds again.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates
The rest of the article is outdated, showing the situation between June and November 2024 without proper update streams.
Microsoft is currently undergoing maintenance and is not providing RSS feeds for Azure updates. The last regular updates was on June 3rd, 2024. For me, this is a major inconvenience.
Azure Updates website is undergoing maintenance. During this time, you may notice limited functionality affecting RSS feeds and search features. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for your patience and understanding.
Critical updates and retirements will also be communicated via emails and service health alerts.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates (2024-06-21)
The alternative fallback is here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-updates/bg-p/AzureUpdates
But this is no longer easily machine readable.
This once more points out the importance of the service health alerts which should be monitored for every resource.
I still hope that this service limitation will end soon, but for now, I haven’t seen any plans for when the service will return to regular operation.
Despite months passing, Microsoft has yet to restore the update RSS feed that I use to stay current with Azure technologies. Fortunately, we have Azure charts websites that are stepping in to help.
https://azurecharts.com/updates
They offer both a website and an RSS feed with the updates. This is extremely valuable.
My proposal for everyone who is waiting is to switch to the following URL: azurecharts.com updates RSS
The HTTP Archive format, known as HAR, is a JSON-formatted archive file format used to log a web browser’s interactions with a website.
To save a HAR file in Chrome, open the Developer Console. The HAR file contains everything, including cookies and sessions, which can be considered secrets. Remember to be careful with whom you share this file. This can be useful if a website encounters an error condition. It can be a valuable way to debug rendering issues.
IP intelligence and looking up IP addresses has been a regular task for me for many years. Whether it’s debugging during attacks or monitoring crawler activity on websites, I have utilized various methods. I began using ipapi.co to look up IP addresses because it does not require an API key, making it convenient an it still allows for some bulk processing. This approach was ideal for the volume of lookups I performed in 2021. While this technique is still effective, exploring other options like locally hosted databases may be more appealing if you require a higher quota and performance.
Recently, I posted about Redis. This time it’s about Azure Service Bus. Also, the options for Azure Service Bus in the Azure Portal are improving, allowing you to do more and more.
