fidzu : cms

In the last article in this series I looked at creating a link directory on a Drupal site. In that article I looked at how I set up the links and took screenshots of the sites using a headless Chromium browser as the links were added.

The issue I had was that when I used headless Chromium to take screenshots of the sites the success rate was not very high. In these days of AI attacks, site captcha checks, and cookie popups it turned out to be quite difficult to take a clean screenshot of a site without being blocked either by a CDN or a cookie popup. In fact, most of the time the screenshot would be just a CDN error page.

I therefore looked for a different mechanism. Since I wanted to take a screenshot of a website it made sense to me to use a browser to do this, and because I am already using a browser why not get the browser I'm using to take the screenshot. After a bit of research I realised that creating browser extensions to do this was actually pretty simple. Plus once the screenshot has been taken I can post this to the Drupal site using a REST resource.

The only niggle was that I needed the screenshot to be at a set dimension, since all the link images on the site also have that dimension. That turned out to be slightly more challenging.

In this article we will look at setting up a rest resource to generate (or update) links, and then creating a Chrome extension to take a screenshot of a site at a set resolution.

First, let's look at creating the REST resource in Drupal.

Creating A REST Resource

This needs to accept the data from the Chrome extension and generate a Link content entity using that data.

Read more

07 Jun 2026 6:15pm GMT

For years, prefetching made me uneasy. It can make websites feel faster, but it also asks visitors to spend bandwidth, CPU, memory, and battery on pages they may never open. That always felt a little wasteful, and maybe even a little disrespectful.

A couple months ago, while updating my HTTP header analyzer, I added support for the Speculation-Rules HTTP header. Learning about the Speculation Rules API inspired me to try it on my own blog.

The idea is simple: a page can give the browser a small JSON rule set that says which links are safe to prefetch, and when. Those rules can live directly in the HTML using <script type="speculationrules">, or in an external file referenced by the Speculation-Rules HTTP header.

For my blog, I added the rules directly to the HTML of every anonymous page request:

<script type="speculationrules">
{
  "prefetch": [{
    "where": {
      "and": [
        { "href_matches": "/*" },
        { "not": { "href_matches": "/search*" } }
      ]
    },
    "eagerness": "conservative"
  }]
}
</script>

The rule tells browsers that any same-origin link is safe to prefetch, except for paths under /search*.

The eagerness: conservative setting fires the prefetch on pointerdown or touchstart, meaning the browser only starts prefetching once the user begins to click or tap a link. There are more aggressive options, such as prefetching when a link becomes visible or when a user hovers over it.

Some of you might point out that browsers have supported prefetching for years through the older <link rel="prefetch"> tag. That is true, but I've never loved it.

Traditional prefetching is great when the next page is highly predictable, like the next step in a checkout flow or setup wizard.

On many websites, including my blog, it's anyone's guess what a visitor will click next. Sometimes you can make a smarter guess, but it is still a guess.

And when you guess wrong, visitors spend bandwidth, battery, and compute on pages they never visit. Multiply that across millions of sites and visitors, and those speculative requests add up.

So why implement Speculation Rules? With eagerness: conservative, the browser waits until the user has already started an action. At that point, the navigation is no longer a vague prediction. It is very likely to happen.

Speculation Rules also respect Battery Saver and Data Saver modes. If a device is low on battery, memory constrained, or trying to conserve data, the prefetching is skipped.

So is prefetching still worth it when the user has already started to click? I think so. With eagerness: conservative, the browser only gets a small head start but something is better than nothing.

Browsers already do some speculative loading on their own without Speculation Rules, but only for high-confidence destinations, like the address bar suggestion you are typing toward.

But they will not prefetch arbitrary links on a page, and for good reason. Prefetching /logout, for example, would sign the visitor out, even if they change their mind and never complete the click or hit Enter.

That is why Speculation Rules can be useful. You can tell the browser which paths are safe and which to leave alone.

In short, Speculation Rules changed my mind because they make prefetching feel more responsible: don't prefetch too much, don't prefetch too early, and only give the browser a safe hint when the user's intent is clear.

05 Jun 2026 2:37pm GMT

For organisations still running Drupal 7, the challenge is often less about whether to upgrade and more about how to modernise without disrupting critical business operations. Niels de Feyter, founder and lead developer of CodeLift, argues that successful upgrades depend on preserving a system's observable behaviour while modernising its underlying platform. In this interview with The Drop Times, he discusses verification, migration complexity, ageing infrastructure, AI-assisted development, and the risks organisations face as legacy systems grow older.

05 Jun 2026 2:03pm GMT