Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

Block unwanted advertisements with /etc/hosts file on Linux

Back in the old days, before the browsers even had extensions like Adblock Plus, many of us – tech-savvy web surfers – used to block unwanted advertising, SPAM sites, and other non-sense using the /etc/hosts file.  The technology behind is very simple – you overwrite the IP address to which the unwanted website’s domain name resolves with a loopback IP address (127.0.0.1).  Whether you do it on your own machine or at a home/office proxy server is irrelevant.  And it worked magic!

Turns out, people still use this technique today.   I came across this article, which shows how to use a rather extensive list of domains for all sorts of online madness, collected and maintained by kind folks at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/.

I tried it out of pure curiosity and sure enough it does what it says.  I’ve reverted back to Adblock Plus a couple of days later though, as random sites were breaking here and there.  I think this might be related to different adblock-detectors that many sites employ these days.  Also, some of the ads use things like embedded scripts or buttons, which might render JavaScript errors, preventing the rest of the page from loading.

But if you’ve never tried it, I strongly recommend giving it a go.

WordPress Theme Developer Handbook

WordPress Theme Developer Handbook:

The Theme Developer Handbook is a repository for all things WordPress themes. Whether you’re new to WordPress themes, or you’re an experienced theme developer, you should be able to find the answer to many of your theme-related questions right here.

Finally, there is a more organized resources that WordPress Codex!

Headless Browsers

Headless Browsers is a list of (almost) all headless web browsers in existence.  These are browsers without graphical user interface, controlled programmatically, and useful for testing, automation, and other similar tasks.

I’ve used one or two.  I’v heard about three of four.  I had no idea there was such a variety though.

Bitcoin – Money Decentralization

With Bitcoin on the rise recently (currently priced at $900+), I thought I’d share the link to this article – Bitcoin – Money Decentralization – which provides some insight into how Bitcoin works and some core principles behind it.

The article is written more from the Computer Science perspective rather than an economic/financial one, some of the economic details might be oversimplified.

The two main aspects that make Bitcoin different from a modern monetary systems, like US Dollar or Euro, are the following:

  1. Decentralization: There is no central entity that prints (mints) money, but rather the money is being mint by the crowd. This makes Bitcoin a decentralized system.
  2. Anonymity: People who use Bitcoin hope that their identity would not be revealed, in contrast to the usual way we all buy commodity over the internet using our credit card, we have to supply our personal details to be verified against the bank who treats our account.