Building for the Web

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.

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 &.

UPPERCASE, snake_case, kebab-case, camelCase and the rest are all the same two steps — split into words, then rejoin with different punctuation and capitalization.

Speech is roughly 130–170 words per minute, so dividing a word count by a speaking rate gives an honest estimate before you hit play.

Word count, character count and the 200-words-per-minute reading-time estimate are three small counts and one division — here's how to do all of it without pasting anything into a tool.

Wider spacing, one sentence per line, cautious syllable marks — a look at what a decoding-focused reformat actually does to a page of text, and what it deliberately leaves alone.

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.

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.

A hex colour is three bytes written in base 16, and once you can read it #1a2b3c stops being opaque. Including why the shorthand #abc expands to #aabbcc and not #0a0b0c.

A tint and shade ramp built by mixing toward white and black in sRGB takes equal steps in the numbers and very unequal steps in perceived lightness. The measurements, on a real nine-step ramp.