Web-Performance Blog
Working on a project, I needed to perform reverse DNS lookups of IP addresses in PHP. The native function gethostbyaddr() seems to be very slow. I managed to vastly improve the speed of the lookups by switching to dns_get_record().
gethostbyaddr($ip);
For Windows users, Notepad++ is still one of the most beloved and best text editors. Of course, Visual Studio Code and Notepad also have their place, but each has its benefits and downsides. While analyzing files or preparing text files, I recently came across the challenge of needing to remove a lot of empty lines in a text file. Lo and behold, Notepad++ can do this without any problems.
You find it here in Notepad++ Edit > Line Operations > Remove Empty Lines
Atlassian did discontinue their server licensing on February 15th, 2024. After a lengthy migration project, the course of action has been decided and tested. It is now time to migrate to the Atlassian Cloud. Unfortunately, as of yet, a custom domain setup is not possible, so we will have to redirect old links to the new domains at Atlassian.
Google and Yahoo is pushing a timeline and a phased introduction of new requirements for email senders and especially bulk-email senders, which are set to begin in February 2024 and continue over the following months.
Today, the news broke that the Google search feature to view a cached version of a webpage will be retired and completely removed.
But the Internet Archive, with the Wayback Machine, has our back. The service is great and worth a try.
I came across the question of a DNAME record and whether it could be used to redirect a website. I was not aware of a DNAME record type in DNS so I went looking. It’s a mapping comparable to a CNAME but more broad.
How to Add Domain WHOIS to Your Windows or Linux Ubuntu System.
Freshping offered an excellent free service for monitoring websites with a 1-minute interval. In comparison, Statuscake’s free plan is limited to a check every 5 minutes. In November 2023, a notice was published stating that all support for free plans would be discontinued for new development. I’m curious about what’s to come, and I hope the service will either remain the same or improve. Of course, the free plan is suitable for personal websites like this one, but in my opinion, it’s not suitable for professional websites. For those, a paid plan is usually the preferred choice.
Recently, I noticed a significant increase in requests from the hostnames like this google-proxy-00-000-00-000.google.com in my log files. Upon investigation, I discovered that this hostname is commonly used for previews in Google Search. However, this explanation did not seem to apply to my situation. Additionally, the source of this information is 10 years old. The received requests from those proxy domains also contained a regular browser user agent string and not an official Google user agent to identify a specific product or service. Further research revealed that Google Chrome is experimenting with hiding the IP address through IP Protection.
I am concerned about this development because routing traffic through Google’s servers may complicate efforts to block DDoS attacks or identify fraudulent activity.
In response to these concerns, Google is considering measures such as requiring authentication with the proxy for users of this feature, preventing the linking of web requests to specific accounts by proxies, and implementing rate-limiting to safeguard against DDoS attacks.
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The Verified Bots service offered by radar.cloudflare.com is a feature that allows website owners to have a good starting point for determining whether a bot might be legitimate.