I just wanted to share that I just published a new Bot Blocker module. This takes a more general approach to blocking bot traffic, and as of right now, provides the ability to block requests based on substrings  occurring in a user agent, i.e. block self-identifying crawlers, and block older versions of major browsers (which seems to be a trend with this recent increase in bot traffic).

Blocks have been around for ages in Drupal. In D8, a published status was introduced to allow site admins to show/hide blocks when needed. The problem? The UI to edit this status still isn't available. This is something I had had casually been keeping an eye on for a while, since it is a common use case on websites to want to hide/show blocks when needed. Especially  for things like "Alerts".

For the layman, a "WAF" or Web Application Firewall is a service you can place in front of your website to protect it from the many threats out on the internet. It can head off known exploits, mitigate DDOS attacks, and block known bad actors. These tools come in a variety of shapes and sizes and pricing will vary. This is also distinct from a "reverse proxy cache" like varnish. Which can improve performance of a site dramatically, and help with some of these things I mentioned, but in general is kind of dumb, and can't react to threats.

I'm a fan of dark modes on everything. Yes, I know this site doesn't currently use a dark theme, it's just the default "Olivero" theme at the moment, but I've struggled to find good, off the shelf themes good for a small blog.  Anyway, I just wanted to post about an issue I filed against Drupal core, requesting a feature to allow it to use the php config's "error_prepend_string" and "error_append_string" configs. This could radically change the infamous "White screen of death" you frequently see when debugging drupal websites.

I can't believe it's been over 4 years since I've written here. A lot has happened I guess. We got through the pandemic. I've continued working on all sorts of interesting projects. The whole AI craze started, and I'm likely going to be replaced by one of those eventually. 

I spent an embarrassing amount of time hung up on this. So I'm writing this  post now, to save anyone else the trouble. I was trying to log into a local, lando-based Drupal site, but I kept getting this error: 

Lately I've been spending a lot of time working with the Feeds module in Drupal, especially dealing with this issue, where using the module on a site in a containerized load-balanced set up can cause problems accessing temporary files. The work around is to just use a different directory for your temporary files. But that comes with some caveats. When you use the systems temporary files directory, e.g.