By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-18.
At first glance, a supplier invoice looks like an ideal task for AI. Identify the supplier, invoice number, date, amount and VAT. Suggest an account, then pass the information to the bookkeeping system.
This can eliminate a significant amount of data entry. But an invoice has not been booked correctly just because the model has produced a neat JSON object.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-17.
Nginx 1.30 changes something more consequential than a feature list might suggest: the way reverse-proxy connections behave by default. Upstream HTTP traffic now uses HTTP/1.1, and each worker can cache up to 32 idle keepalive connections.
For many systems, that will reduce repeated connection setup and make a few old configuration lines redundant. It can also leave more backend connections open, increase socket use and expose assumptions buried in inherited configuration.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-16.
OpenAI will shut down the Assistants API on August 26, 2026. Ten days out, this has become a product continuity issue.
Any live application that still creates Assistants, stores Thread IDs, initiates Runs or listens for Assistant-specific stream events needs a tested replacement path. The successor is the Responses API, with Conversations for durable state and Prompts for versioned configuration. OpenAI says Responses has reached feature parity with Assistants, but that does not make the move automatic.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-15.
A WordPress block can look flawless on the published page and still fail in the place your content team uses every day: the editor.
That risk becomes more immediate with WordPress 7.1, scheduled for August 19, 2026. The post editor will always place its editing canvas inside an iframe, removing the temporary compatibility route retained in WordPress 7.0.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-14.
A self-hosted GitHub Actions runner can be online, registered and apparently healthy, yet still be too old to receive work. GitHub is resuming enforcement of its runner version requirements. Brownouts for GitHub Enterprise Cloud begin on August 24, 2026, followed by full enforcement on September 25.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-13.
Once an AI agent has a shell, the quality of its answers is only part of the risk. The more important question is what the resulting process can read, change, execute, contact, or authorize.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-12.
Cloudflare’s recent change to its DNS-over-HTTPS JSON responses is fairly narrow. The engineering problem it exposes is not.
On July 28, 2026, Cloudflare began rolling out breaking formatting changes for additional record types returned by the 1.1.1.1 DoH JSON endpoint. Old and new representations may coexist during the rollout. The same parser could see one shape in a test and another in production, even when the queries look much the same.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-11.
A visitor comes to your website with a specific question. Your search box expects the right keywords. They try once, open a few links, then give up.
NLWeb offers a different experience: visitors ask questions in ordinary language and receive structured answers grounded in the site's own content. This is no longer limited to experimental demos. There is now an open protocol, a reference implementation and a deployment route through Cloudflare.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-11.
Until recently, most AI search reporting relied on screenshots, synthetic prompts, and scores created by third-party tools. Those methods still have a place in research, but they cannot show whether a company's pages actually appeared across major search platforms, much less whether that exposure led to a qualified enquiry.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-11.
A passed CAPTCHA or Turnstile challenge is reassuring, but it is not a verdict on the visitor. Modern automation can run JavaScript, operate through a real browser and behave normally for the few seconds needed to clear a checkpoint.
The useful question comes next. What did that session actually do? Did it create one account or hundreds? Browse a handful of products or work methodically through the catalogue? Leave a genuine review or add to a coordinated publishing pattern?
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-11.
WordPress 7.1 is scheduled for August 19, 2026. For editors, uploading an image may look much the same as before. Underneath, however, WordPress is changing where much of the work happens—and that affects plugins, custom code, CDN integrations, and hosting infrastructure.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-10.
Prompt caching is no longer something teams can safely leave running in the background and assume it saves money. With GPT-5.6, cache writes cost 1.25 times the uncached input rate, while cache reads receive a 90% discount. OpenAI has also introduced explicit breakpoints and a minimum cache lifetime of 30 minutes.
That changes the question. It is not enough to ask whether caching is enabled. You need to know whether the prefix written on one request is actually reused by the next.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-09.
Access logs can look reassuringly precise. A request arrives labelled OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot, or another familiar agent, and the reporting layer assigns that traffic to the named vendor.
The problem is that the requester supplies its own User-Agent. As Cloudflare points out, any client can send any User-Agent string. The label in your log is a claim about identity. It is not proof.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-08.
A billing dashboard tells you what an AI agent has already spent. It does not stop the agent that is still retrying a broken tool, expanding its context, or delegating more work while nobody is watching the chart.
That is the practical difference between monitoring agent costs and controlling them.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-07.
Drupal 12 is now scheduled for the week of December 7, 2026. Drupal 10 reaches end of life on December 9. At first glance, those dates seem to support a tidy plan: stay on Drupal 10, wait for Drupal 12, then modernise the site once.
Unfortunately, Drupal's upgrade path does not work that way. Major versions cannot be skipped. A Drupal 10 site must move to Drupal 11.3.0 or later before it can move to Drupal 12.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-05.
European data residency can look like a setting you switch on. For a live OpenAI API integration, it is an architectural change with consequences for routing, credentials, stored data, application behaviour and operating costs.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-04.
A disclosure label tells people that AI played a part in an image. It does not tell them where the image came from, what happened to it along the way, or whether any supporting evidence survived publication.
That is the job of a chain of custody. For a business, the practical question is not simply whether an approved image had provenance data when it entered the workflow. It is whether the organisation can still connect that source file to the version a customer, regulator, partner or journalist actually receives.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-03.
The stable MCP specification published on 28 July 2026 changes the working assumptions behind many MCP integrations. Clients and servers now establish compatibility differently. State, notifications, long-running tasks, caching and authorization credentials all follow revised rules.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-03.
SEO in 2026 still looks a lot like SEO in 2024. Useful content matters. Search engines need to access and understand your pages. Visitors need a site that works well, and they need reliable information about the organisation behind it.
By Greg Nowak. Last updated 2026-08-03.
Slow interactions and inefficient pages often have the same root cause: the site is making the browser, network or server do more work than the experience needs. Run separate INP and green SEO audits, and you can easily end up with two reports competing for space in the same development queue.
