Today I'm releasing TinyWFL, my tiny web font loader which is about 95% smaller than other popular loaders.
When web fonts started to gain adoption around 2010, the problem people had was FOUT - the flash of unstyled text while you waited for the browser to download the font. I think most people would agree that this has since been solved very comprehensively by webfontloader from Google and Typekit, and that it's now the de-facto standard loader - but back in 2010 or 2011 FOUT was still an issue, which is why I wrote my own.
If you run a website which receives or displays personal information, passwords or other secrets, you need to encrypt your connections using SSL or TLS. This is what puts the "S" into HTTPS, FTPS, IMAPS, POPS etc, and requires private keys and public certificates. Your browser (or other SSL/TLS client) trusts certain CAs (certificate authorities), and they in turn are willing to trust you by issuing you a certificate, if you throw money at them.
This is necessary for public-facing production deployments, and these days the cheapest certificates don't cost the earth - for example, Namecheap's start ...
I have been meaning to get back on the blogging horse for some time, and what better way than with a new SSL vulnerability.
POODLE was announced this morning. It's a 5/10 on the panic scale, but both users and sysadmins should take action now.
This one isn't particularly exciting compared to the recent sky-is-falling heartbleed and shellshock - instead of giving away all your secrets and/or shell access to anyone with curl, the worst-case scenario with POODLE is that someone can read your SSL traffic; still bad, but for most people running small sites it's ...
The new Christmas design for this site uses bezier curves on canvas elements to generate random snowdrifts behind the header. Drawing a bezier curve is pretty simple, so seems like a reasonable place to start my new blog. First you need a canvas and a context: