We have client that was experiencing cache issues. My research revealed that there were no cache headers in place, and so the browser was left to decide for itself if it should refresh the page. No bueno!!
This site checks the cache headers for you:
Request Metrics – https://requestmetrics.com/resources/tools/http-cache-checker
Here’s another site that tells you some good stuff, too:
Redbot – https://redbot.org/
Recently, I had trouble installing a 3rd party certificate, and found these commands for Linux that can help debug the supplied files. The commands are run from the command line, in the directory where the files are located.
openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in domain.com.key | openssl md5
openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in domain.com.crt | openssl md5
openssl rsa -in domain.com.key -check
It turned out that the files were OK, but I needed to open one of the files in the web hosting file manager editor, and copy/paste from there. Bizarre, but it worked.
Recently, I came upon a monitoring tool for email, URIports. It monitors and tests all kinds of things on your website, and it accepts and processes DMARC reports. It’s $60 per year to monitor one domain. I’ve used it on one of our websites to test it out, and am hoping it will get good results once I further develop the website.
One of the interesting things that came up during the setup of URIports is BIMI, which is the method for getting icons to appear next to your name in email. I’ve seen it, but never knew how they did it.
It turns out you need a combination of special images and DNS entries to make it work. I followed the directions on these pages:
How to Set Up BIMI for Brand Recognition in the Inbox
How to Setup BIMI to Increase Your Email Open Rates
Image converter tool is here. Super nice.
There’s also a BIMI Inspector tool to help you build the DNS entries and check the setup.
For this to work with Google and the major providers, you need a special certificate, which is pretty expensive at around $1k per year.
One of my responsibilities is writing scripts for clients. When I need to test an API, or do stuff that’s outside of the scripting, Postman is just the ticket.
Sometimes I need to send passwords and other sensitive data. This site lets me do that:
Not perfect, but better than sending everything in an email.
For the most part, WordPress is a trouble-free platform. Sometimes, though, we need a little help.
WordPress Troubleshooting Tools
Hopefully I won’t need any of these very much, but good to know.
I had a website that was getting an error that didn’t generate anything helpful on the page or in the website error logs, so I found out how to turn on debugging in WordPress.
https://wpforms.com/developers/how-to-enable-debugging-in-wordpress/
It creates a log file with all of the errors. Super helpful!
We recently had a customer who needed an update to DNS, and it was taking a very, very long time to propagate. While researching how to help fix it, I found these sites that may come in handy.
To see what’s going on with DNS propagation, use this tool: What Is My DNS
And if you ever need to check a particular DNS server’s entries, use this: Query a DNS Server
Plus a very handy page describing how to use nslookup: 10 Most Used nslookup Commands
Sometimes you don’t want Google or other search engines indexing some content on your site. Here’s an article to help set up a robots.txt file.
This website came in handy when I was working on a project that involved a webhook to connect two online services. It allows you to send a request and it will show the results. Nifty!