Guides & Tutorials
Ten long-form guides covering the concepts behind the tools — from how binary works to how search engines read structured data.
All guides
Long-form explanations of the concepts behind the tools. Each one is written to be read on its own, cites its sources, and links to the tools that put the ideas into practice.
Binary Numbers Explained for Beginners
How base-2 works, why computers use it and how to convert by hand.
Character Encoding: ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8
A practical history of text encoding and how to avoid mojibake for good.
Hashing vs Encryption vs Encoding
Three concepts that get confused daily, separated once and for all.
Password Security and Entropy
What entropy really measures, how cracking works and what NIST recommends.
The Complete Guide to SEO Meta Tags
Titles, descriptions, canonicals, robots directives and social markup.
Structured Data and Rich Results
Choosing schema types, writing JSON-LD and validating it properly.
URL Structure Best Practices for SEO
Slugs, depth, parameters, trailing slashes and international URLs.
How QR Codes Actually Work
Encoding modes, Reed-Solomon error correction and design constraints.
Regular Expressions from Zero to Confident
Build regex patterns step by step and avoid catastrophic backtracking.
Colour and Contrast Accessibility
WCAG contrast ratios, colour blindness and building accessible palettes.
Where to start
New to how computers represent data? Read Binary Numbers Explained first, then Character Encoding. Between them they cover everything the binary and text tools rely on.
Working on security? Hashing vs Encryption vs Encoding clears up the terminology, and Password Security and Entropy covers what current guidance actually says.
Doing SEO? Start with SEO Meta Tags, then Structured Data and URL Structure.
Building interfaces? Colour and Contrast Accessibility is the one with the most immediate practical effect.
Reference material
For lookup rather than reading, the reference tables cover ASCII, Unicode blocks, HTML entities, HTTP status codes, MIME types, regex syntax, CSS colours and binary conversion. The glossary defines every term used across the site.