The Tools
How the tools work, why they refuse to guess, and what runs on your device.
X reads its own twitter: tags first and only falls back to Open Graph if they're missing — here's the fallback order and how to check which tags actually won.
Facebook, LinkedIn and Slack don't render your page when you paste a link — they read four meta tags. Here's what each one does and the size that actually fits.
It's a request, not a lock — three lines of syntax, one honest limitation, and the one rule that trips people up.
Pretty-printing JSON is just re-indenting by bracket depth — count the opens and closes as you go, and a tangled one-liner turns into a readable tree.
A tracking link is the same URL plus three query parameters appended with the right separator — the method is one rule about when to use ? and when to use &.
If you own a domain, you can host a static site for free on Cloudflare Pages. Here's how to do it and harden it so it isn't soft — with five free WAF rules that stay effective even in public.
No account, no ads, no trackers, no upload. Here is how the whole thing fits together — and why the free half is genuinely free.
Four ideas — character classes, anchors, quantifiers, groups — handle most of what people actually need. The rest is testing the pattern on your own data.
It looks scrambled, so people treat it as though it hides something. It hides nothing — here is a round trip you can check, and what that means for anything you have encoded.
A JSON Web Token is signed, not encrypted. The signature proves nobody altered it — it does not hide a single character of what is inside.
SHA-256 is not encryption and there is no reverse operation. Here is what a hash is genuinely good for, and one job it is the wrong tool for.
Contrast ratio is a defined calculation over relative luminance, not a judgement call. The gamma correction, the channel weights, and one worked example from two hex codes to a number.