The site's main sections — how-to guides, security, tech notes, web development, development, reviews, and the journal — organise content by the type of writing. A practical walkthrough lives in how-to. A vulnerability analysis lives in security. A behavioural observation lives in tech notes.

But technical subjects rarely respect those boundaries. Configuring X11 display forwarding on WSL is a how-to guide, but understanding why it breaks involves a tech note about networking behaviour, and securing the connection touches the security section. Browser extensions span security investigations, development notes, and reviews simultaneously. Web performance involves server configuration, front-end patterns, and protocol-level analysis all at once.

Topic clusters solve this by grouping related content across every section it appears in. Each topic page collects the guides, investigations, notes, and reviews that address a common theme, regardless of which section they live in editorially. If you are working on a specific subject and want to see everything the site has covered from every angle, topics are the right entry point.

Browser Extensions​

Browse the Browser Extensions topic →

Browser extensions sit at a fascinating and uncomfortable intersection of user empowerment and security risk. They can transform a browser into a genuinely better tool — blocking trackers, managing passwords, reformatting hostile web pages into readable text — but they do so with access to everything the user sees and types in the browser window. The permission model that governs this access has been one of the most consequential and under-examined parts of the web platform for years.

The site's coverage of browser extensions spans several dimensions. On the security side, there are investigations into extension permission escalation patterns, the practical implications of Manifest V3's revised permission model, and the gap between what users think an extension can access and what it actually can. The development notes cover the practicalities of building and maintaining extensions across Chrome, Firefox, and other Chromium-based browsers. Reviews assess specific extensions on their merits, with attention to privacy implications, performance overhead, and whether the tool actually does what it claims.

The Manifest V3 migration has been a recurring thread since Chrome began pushing the transition, and the coverage tracks the practical reality of that shift — what broke, what improved, and what the timeline actually looked like versus the announcements. If you develop or maintain browser extensions, or if you are trying to evaluate the security posture of the extensions you rely on, this cluster pulls together every relevant page.

Linux on Windows​

Browse the Linux on Windows topic →

The Windows Subsystem for Linux changed the daily workflow of a significant number of developers and system administrators, but the lived experience of using it has always been more nuanced than the feature announcements suggest. WSL is a remarkable piece of engineering that also produces a steady stream of edge cases, filesystem surprises, networking quirks, and display headaches that are poorly documented elsewhere.

This topic cluster collects everything the site has published about running Linux on Windows. The how-to guides cover the practical tasks: setting up X11 display forwarding, configuring DNS resolution, managing file permissions across filesystem boundaries, and getting development toolchains to behave correctly. The tech notes document the specific behaviours — how rm -rf interacts with the Windows filesystem layer, what happens when you mix Windows paths with Linux paths, how networking works (and does not work) across WSL 1 and WSL 2.

The coverage spans the entire lifecycle of WSL so far, from the early WSL 1 days through WSL 2's VM-based architecture to the current WSLg era where graphical Linux applications run natively alongside Windows apps. Older material is maintained with context markers so you know which generation of WSL a particular observation applies to. If you use WSL daily and something is not working the way you expect, there is a good chance this cluster addresses it.

Privacy & Security​

Browse the Privacy & Security topic →

Privacy and security are separate concerns that overlap constantly in practice. A messaging protocol that sends data in plaintext is both a security vulnerability and a privacy failure. A browser extension with excessive permissions is a security risk and a potential surveillance vector. Server hardening reduces your attack surface and also limits what data an attacker can exfiltrate.

This topic cluster brings together the site's security investigations, privacy tooling assessments, server hardening guides, and the tech notes that document protocol and platform behaviours with privacy or security implications. The EA Origin plaintext chat investigation is representative of the security research: starting from observed network traffic, documenting exactly what was exposed, and drawing broader conclusions about messaging security practices.

The server hardening coverage includes SSH configuration, firewall management across multiple tools (UFW, firewalld, nftables, iptables), fail2ban setup and tuning, and the practical security decisions that small-server operators face. Privacy tooling coverage addresses DNS-level blocking, browser fingerprinting resistance, and the real-world effectiveness of privacy-focused configurations.

If you are responsible for the security of systems or the privacy of users — or if you are a user trying to understand what your own tools are doing with your data — this cluster provides the technical depth that most privacy guides skip over.

Web Performance​

Browse the Web Performance topic →

Making websites fast is a deceptively complex problem. The easy wins — enable compression, set cache headers, optimise images — are well known and widely implemented. The hard part is everything after that: understanding why a specific configuration performs differently under HTTP/2 than HTTP/1.1, why Brotli compression at level 11 is a terrible idea for dynamic content, why your Core Web Vitals scores disagree with your real user experience, and why the CDN cache hit ratio dropped after a seemingly unrelated deployment.

This topic cluster collects the site's web performance coverage across practical configuration guides, server tuning notes, and the technical context that explains why things work the way they do. The Apache mod_brotli configuration guide is one of the more detailed pages — it does not just show the configuration directives, it explains the compression level trade-offs, the interaction with proxy caching, and the scenarios where gzip remains the better choice.

Coverage also includes content delivery strategy, HTTP header optimisation, crawler management (because aggressive bots can destroy your server's performance for real users), and the practical interpretation of web performance metrics. If you run web infrastructure and care about real-world load times rather than just synthetic scores, this cluster is where the relevant material lives.

Open Web​

Browse the Open Web topic →

The open web is a platform, and like any platform, its health depends on the diversity and competence of its implementations, the integrity of its standards processes, and the practical willingness of major players to honour the interoperability commitments that make the whole thing work. This topic cluster addresses the parts of that picture that the site's coverage touches.

Browser diversity — or the lack of it — has been a recurring theme. The practical implications of Chromium's dominance show up in extension compatibility, in which web APIs get implemented and which languish, and in the standards process itself where implementation leverage matters more than specification quality. The site's coverage documents these dynamics through specific examples rather than abstract commentary.

Web standards coverage focuses on the gaps between specification and reality — the places where browser implementations diverge, where specifications are ambiguous in ways that matter, and where the "just follow the standard" advice falls apart in practice. This includes icon and manifest handling, HTTP protocol behaviour, and the progressive enhancement patterns that still work versus those that have been quietly broken by platform changes.

The GNOME Web app icon investigation is a good example of the kind of content in this cluster: a detailed look at how one browser handles web app icons differently from the specification's intent, and what that means for developers targeting the platform.

Section hubs​

Topics cut across sections, but sometimes you want to browse within a single editorial type. The section hubs are:

• How-To Guides — practical walkthroughs for specific technical tasks
• Security — vulnerability research, protocol analysis, and security investigations
• Tech Notes — precise behavioural observations and platform-specific documentation
• Web Development — server configuration, front-end performance, and web infrastructure notes
• Development — tooling, scripting, and build system documentation
• Reviews — honest assessments of software and services
• Journal — longer essays, commentary, and observations

The search page provides additional guidance on finding specific content, and the changelog tracks what has been added or updated recently.