Chris Lynch: Technologist

Chris Lynch has worked in technology for over 20 years as a developer, system architect, project manager, digital marketer, CTO, and now IT Director for InsureTech business Source Insurance.

Chris considers himself a bit of an old war horse now and says he's seen a few things.

"I remember a time when Google wasn’t the biggest search engine on the planet, people still believed that fax machines wouldn’t be replaced by email, having a smart-phone meant you’d bought a leather case for your Nokia 3210, and a “Face Book” was something serial killers kept under their beds. Although the landscape around me has changed almost constantly, my love for technology has never waned."

Since Chris' early days working for the NHS, he has been a huge advocate of open source technologies. Chris is currently fascinated by containers, nodeJS and the npm ecosystem, and building microservices. Chris is also still enjoying working with the LAMP stack and recently converted this website from Wordpress to Kirby (running in a container, of course!).

Chris Lynch has created several open-source projects of his own, including:

Bubble: A web based editor for comic book scripts
Return: An SEO auditing utility

and a range of technology demonstrations/shared scripts.

The Cost of Open Source is Constant Vigilance

We take Open Source software for-granted today. Statistically, there's a good chance that you are reading this article in a web browser based on Chromium, the open source browser that Google markets as Chrome, or that uses Webkit, connected to this website using security powered by SSL, transported over HTTPS and TCP/IP, using DNS to translate a domain name into an IP Address. The page is written in HTML and uses CSS and Javascript, all open standards.

Is Web Assembly a Security Risk?

Cyber-criminals are increasingly using Web Assembly (WASM) to deploy malicious code, raising serious questions about the security model around Web Assembly and its future.

The Crypto Winter is Coming

Back in 2018 when I wrote The Truth About SEO I made a reference to cryptocurrencies...

Bigger boys made me do it: Why copying "leaders" is sometimes a bad idea

If you've worked for any serious amount of time in eCommerce or digital marketing, you'll have come across a client who wants to copy functionality or design from another company. They probably also think it's easy to do this.

WebAssembly 2.0 seeks to fix the gaps in current WebAssembly

I previously wrote about the excitement around WebAssembly and, having seen many technologies like this come and go in the past, my analysis of why WebAssembly might be a bad idea. In summary, it's not that it is technologically bad - it's simply that I don't see a space for it in a world where computing power has been becoming thinner on the client-side for years and microprocessor prices are skyrocketing.

Confirmed: AI-Generated Content Is Against Google's Guidelines

Throughout my career in digital marketing, there were a few rules that I always held to be immutable. One of them was this - If you can automate it, it's probably SPAM. This rule steered me the right way on many occasions when tempting shortcuts were offered to me. I'd lived through the dark times of SEO, you see, times when Google was more easily fooled than it is today and SEO forums were awash with hacks, grifts, and ways to "trick" Google.

Niche vs. Brand Marketing (Goodbye chrislynchwriter.com)

My ruthless cull of domains continues! Now that all of my books, short stories, and movies are listed on this site I'm dropping more of my niche-specific domains and redirecting all of the traffic here. In some instances, the timeline for this is short, the expiry for the domains coming around sooner than it might have done if I was working with a strictly timed plan.

Why I Think WebAssembly is a Bad Idea

If you haven't discovered WebAssembly yet, it's a pretty exciting technology that allows you to code in a range of languages (C++, Rust, and Typescript most notably) then compile your code into a WASM file that can run in all popular web browsers. Because the code is compiled it runs quickly and consistently across all devices. WebAssembly can't render directly and has to rely on being called by and emitting Javascript to manipulate the DOM, but it still opens up some exciting options and introduces the potential to do things in the browser that we just can't do right now like 3D games, heavy image manipulation, cryptography, etc.

How Google's Pirate Update can kill off sites stealing your content

Google has revealed that it now has a specific penalty that it applies to sites that receive repeated upheld DCMA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown requests. In other words, it has a special button it can press to kill off sites hosting pirated content.

Facebook vs. Google vs. You: How your privacy became the ball everyone's fighting over

It's common knowledge that Facebook (or "Meta" if you prefer) likes to track you around the internet, seeing where you go, what you look at, and then use that information to help target advertising.

Picking a Domain Name When There's No SEO Bonus For Keyword-Based Domains

In a boost for digital agencies with names like "Tangarine Kangaroo" or "Excessive Aubergine", brands that took the name of a thing and just shoved "ly" or "ify" on the end, and former digital marketing CTOs who have decided to dump nearly all their domain names and put all their content on one site... Google has confirmed that there is no specific SEO bonus for keyword-based domains.

The Facebook Watch that Watches You Back?

Facebook Technologies, AKA Meta, AKA Those Guys Who Use Your Data to Sell Advertising, AKA Those Guys Who Just Lost a Huge Load of Money, have a new patent and things may be about to get interesting in the wearables space yet again.

Google Says Code To Text Ratio Has Never Been An SEO Factor... but is that really true?

Moments of clarity from Google are rare, so it's nice to when they come out and say something simple and unambiguous like

All (Good) Things Must Come To an End. Is Facebook dying?

Facebook isn't cool any more and users are leaving in droves. Ad revenue is down and shares are plummeting just at the point when Marky Mark Zuckerberg needs every penny he can scrape together to build "the metaverse"; a virtual world in which people can work, play, and live out a fantasy existence where Facebook remains implausibly relevant for anyone under 25.

The Long List of Apps and Services Killed by Google

I'm a pretty loyal Google user. Although I'm always ready to point out the more questionable aspects of their strategy to dominate the search engine space, I remain a big fan of a lot of their technology. I love my Chromebook and truly think web-based applications and a thin client-side OS are here to stay. I've always preferred cloud computing (or "client-server" as we used to call it) to thick client stuff. Computing should be cheap and accessible and Chromebooks, and free services from the likes of Google, go a long way to making that possible. It's possible to like the hammer but not the man holding it, if that makes any sense?

Pandemic Analytics or Lies, Lies and Damned Statistics

Leaving #digitalmarketing means I have a chance to call things out thst I previously would have put aside for fear of looking like I was going out of my way to have a pop at competitors.

Get correct UK time in PHP on Windows (including daylight savings time)

When running on Windows, PHP's timezones don't always play nicely with the Windows implementation of daylight savings time (DST). The code below is an easy workaround to this; simple use date("I") to work out if it is summer or not and combine this with date() and strtotime() to get the spot-on time including your GMT offset.

Find files that have changed in Linux

I'll confess, I stole this from somewhere on Stack Overflow and I'm posting it here just because it's so flipping useful I know I will need it again some day.

Find (and delete) old files in Linux

I've got a confession to make - I'm a log file addict. I love a good log file and I'll hold on to those bad boys for way longer than I should sometimes. Even I need to clear down the odd /logs directory every now and then though, and that's where this handy little piece of command-line-fu comes into play.

Run code-server with Apache

code-server is nothing short of amazing. A fully-fledged VSCode environment running in a browser means I can jump from one machine to another, including my beloved Pixelbook, with full access to my development environment and toolset. After months of subscribing to services like Codeanywhere, CodeTasty, replacing this with something under my control (and costing me not a red cent) is pretty cool.

How to get the MD5 Fingerprint RSA Key for a Linux Server

If you're writing code to connect to a Linux server over SSH or SFTP, you may need to get the MD5 "fingerprint" of the server. It's that funny little string of numbers that appears, just once, when you connect to a server and you never see again unless it changes...