CategoryHTTPS

December 14, 2021 — To be able to modify headers in a testing environment is a great thing to have. It allows control over your application as one can bypass authentication, set cookies, and so on. In this article, Nafees Nehar explores some methods which allow modification of headers in an automation testing setup. Read more…

June 12, 2017 — HTTPS is a must for every website nowadays: Users are looking for the padlock when providing their details; Chrome and Firefox explicitly mark websites that provide forms on pages without HTTPS as being non-secure; it is an SEO ranking factor; and it has a serious impact on privacy in general. Read more…

April 10, 2017 — The landscape for the performance-minded developer has changed significantly in the last year or so, with the emergence of HTTP/2 being perhaps the most significant of all. No longer is HTTP/2 a feature we pine for. It has arrived, and with it comes server push! Read more…

April 3, 2017 — Web applications, be they thin websites or thick single-page apps, are notorious targets for cyber-attacks. In 2016, approximately 40% of data breaches originated from attacks on web apps — the leading attack pattern. Indeed, these days, understanding cyber-security is not a luxury but rather a necessity for web developers, especially for developers who build consumer-facing applications. HTTP response headers can be leveraged to tighten up the security of web apps, typically just by adding a few lines of code. In this article, we’ll show how web developers can use HTTP headers to build secure apps. While the code examples are for Node.js, setting HTTP response headers is supported across all major server-side-rendering platforms and is typically simple to set up. Read more…

October 5, 2016 — Chances are pretty good that you’ve worked with, or at least understand the concept of, server compression. By compressing website assets on the server prior to transferring them to the browser, we’ve been able to achieve substantial performance gains. For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, you’ll get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and we’ll compare its performance to gzip. Read more…

June 21, 2016 — If you have an e-commerce website, then SSL is mandatory for safely processing credit cards. But even if you aren’t processing payments, you should still seriously consider secure HTTP (or HTTPS), especially now that I’m going to show you how to set it up quickly, for free. Let’s get started. In short, SSL is the “S” in HTTPS. It adds a layer of encryption to HTTP that ensures that the recipient is actually who they claim to be and that only authorized recipients can decrypt the message to see its contents. Read more…

February 4, 2016 — _Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team. Read more…

May 20, 2015 — Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article Carlo Daniele will show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location. Today you are going to add several functionalities to WordPress’ core, and the CMS allows you to declare our own custom functions in the main file of a plugin. Read more…

December 11, 2014 — In this tutorial, Collins Agbonghama will talk about ROT13 encryption and how it works. You’ll see how text can be programmatically encoded in ROT13 using PHP. Finally, you’ll code a WordPress plugin that scans a post for blacklisted words and replaces any in ROT13 encryption. Even if you don’t end up using the plugin, the concepts you’ll learn in creating it can be applied to many situations, such as obfuscating or encrypting inappropriate words (such as profanities) in ROT13, which would be a nice feature in a forum where people have the freedom to post anything. Read more…