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Tutorials, guides, and close looks from the team
that owns the infrastructure.

Featured Posts

How to Read a robots.txt File: A Complete Guide

`robots.txt` stopped being a convention in 2022. It is now a standard, [RFC 9309](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309.txt), with defined matching semantics and required behaviour. Most explanations of it are older than that and get two things wrong: they say rules are matched in order (they are not) and they say a missing file means the same as an unreachable one (it does not). Here is what the specification actually says, and how to read a real file correctly.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Find All Pages on a Website: A Complete Guide

There is no way to obtain a complete list of every page on a website, and understanding why is the first useful step. A site knows its own pages; you do not. What you can build is a union of several partial views — the sitemap, the archive record, the search index, the crawl — each of which sees something the others miss. This guide covers the eight sources worth using, in the order that saves the most work.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How Many Proxies Do You Actually Need?

The honest answer to "how many proxies do I need" is almost always "fewer than you think", and the useful answer comes from a measurement that takes about twenty minutes. Most people arrive at a number by reading a forum post or by assuming that more must be safer. Both approaches overshoot badly, and on per-gigabyte pricing the overshoot is not even the expensive mistake. Here is the method, with worked examples for the common workloads.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is Proxy Authentication? Explained Simply

Proxy authentication is how a proxy server decides whether you are allowed to use it. It is a completely separate mechanism from authenticating to the website you are trying to reach. Confusing the two is the single most common source of proxy configuration problems, and the status codes are designed to tell them apart if you read them. This guide covers both methods providers offer, why one of them is safer than people assume, and where credentials leak.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

CSS Selectors Cheat Sheet: Guide with Examples

CSS selectors are the shortest way to say which elements you mean. They are used for styling, for querying in JavaScript, and for extraction in every serious scraping library. This is a reference organised for practical use: the syntax tables first, then the pseudo-classes that actually earn their place, then specificity, then the patterns that come up repeatedly. It also covers what CSS still cannot do, which is a shorter list than it used to be.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

XPath by Class: Guide with Examples

Selecting by class is the most common thing anyone does with a selector, and it is the thing XPath does worst. The expression everyone writes first — `//div[@class='card']` — matches only elements whose class attribute is exactly that string, so it misses `class="card featured"`. The obvious fix, `contains(@class, 'card')`, matches `card-large` and `discard` too. Neither is right. Here is what is, plus when to use a CSS selector instead.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

XPath vs CSS Selectors: Guide with Examples

CSS selectors are shorter and more readable. XPath is more capable. That summary is accurate and useless on its own, because the capability gap is narrower than it was and the readability gap is not. What matters is which specific things each cannot do, and there are only about four of those on each side. This guide is that list, plus how the arrival of `:has()` changed the calculation and what it did not change.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

XPath Cheat Sheet: Guide with Examples

XPath is a query language for navigating XML and HTML documents. It has a small core and a large number of ways to misuse it. This is a reference organised the way you actually need it: syntax first, then the functions worth knowing, then the patterns that come up repeatedly, then the traps. Everything here is XPath 1.0, which is what browsers, Selenium and most parsing libraries implement.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Set a Custom User-Agent with curl (+Examples)

`curl -A "MyBot/1.0" https://example.com` sets the User-Agent header. That is the syntax, and the interesting question is what to put in it. The instinctive answer — copy a Chrome string — is frequently the wrong one, because it creates a contradiction between what you claim to be and what your connection demonstrably is. This guide covers the syntax, the removal case, and the more useful strategy of identifying yourself honestly.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Use Basic Authentication with curl (+Examples)

`curl -u username:password https://example.com` sends basic authentication. That works, and it also puts your password somewhere you probably did not intend. curl's own manual is unusually blunt about it: sensitive data "should be retrieved from a file instead or similar and never used in clear text in a command line". This guide covers the syntax, the three safer alternatives, how basic auth differs from the other schemes, and what changes when a proxy is in the path.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Send a POST Request with curl (+Examples)

`curl -d "key=value" https://example.com` sends a POST. That is the whole basic answer, and it is also the source of the most common error people hit next. `-d` sets a form-encoded content type. Send JSON with it and forget the header, and many APIs will reject you with a 415. This guide covers form data, JSON including the shortcut most people do not know about, file uploads, and how to tell which of the several data options you actually want.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is a Clean Proxy? Explained Simply

"Clean proxies" is one of the most-used phrases in this industry and one of the least defined. Nobody agrees what it means, which makes it excellent marketing and poor information. Here is the version that survives contact with reality: cleanliness is not a property of an address. It is a relationship between an address and a specific target, and it changes over time. That reframing has consequences for what you should test and what you should refuse to believe.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

curl for Beginners: A Complete Guide

curl fetches a URL and prints the result. Everything else is options, and there are over two hundred of them. You need about eight to be productive. This guide covers those eight, the mental model that makes the rest readable, and the handful of mistakes that catch everyone at the start. By the end you will be able to send requests, read responses, debug what actually went over the wire, and know which manual page to open next.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Take a Screenshot with Playwright

`await page.screenshot({ path: 'shot.png' })` takes a screenshot. That is the easy part, and it is also where most guides stop. The harder part is making screenshots that are the same twice — which matters enormously if you are comparing them, and matters not at all if you are just looking at one. This guide covers both, plus the options that control what gets captured and the case where screenshots are genuinely the right verification tool.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Set a Proxy for wget (+Examples)

wget has no `--proxy` option. That surprises people coming from curl, and it is the first thing to know. Proxies are configured through environment variables, a configuration file, or exclusion flags — and the exclusion variable, `no_proxy`, matches in a way that is narrower than most people assume. This guide covers all three methods, the SOCKS limitation nobody mentions, and how to read wget's exit codes when something goes wrong.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Are Proxies Safe to Use? Explained Simply

A proxy is a machine you voluntarily route your traffic through. Whether that is safe depends almost entirely on who runs it and what your traffic looks like when it passes. The short version: a reputable paid proxy carrying HTTPS traffic is a modest, manageable risk. A free public proxy is a genuinely bad idea, and there is peer-reviewed research explaining why. Here is the full picture, including what proxies do not protect you from at all.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is a Proxy Pool? Explained Simply

A proxy pool is a collection of IP addresses you can route requests through, usually behind a single endpoint that picks one for you. The number everyone advertises — how many addresses are in it — is close to the least useful thing about it. This guide covers what actually determines whether a pool works for your job, how to measure it before committing, and how many addresses you genuinely need, which is almost always fewer than you think.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is DataDome? Explained Simply

DataDome is bot protection that sits in front of a website and decides, per request, whether you are allowed through. If you have hit an unexpected block on a retail or ticketing site, this is often what did it. Most searches for it are looking for a way round. This article is not that, and the reason is not squeamishness — it is that a legitimate route is opening up which is more durable than any workaround. Here is what it actually does, and what your options genuinely are.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is a Subnet ID? Explained Simply

A subnet ID is the part of an IP address that identifies the network rather than the individual machine on it. Split the address in two, and the left-hand part is the subnet. That is a networking fundamental with an unexpectedly practical consequence: sites that block addresses frequently block whole subnets, which is why a thousand proxies from one block can be worth less than fifty from fifty. This guide covers what a subnet ID is, how to work one out, and what it means when you are buying addresses.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

XPath contains(): A Complete Guide With Examples

`contains()` is the XPath function people reach for most and understand least. It looks like a substring test and behaves like one only when you give it a string. Given a node-set — which is what most expressions produce — it silently uses only the first node and ignores the rest. This guide covers that trap, the class-matching idiom nobody gets right first time, and the whitespace and case handling that XPath 1.0 makes harder than it should be.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Playwright Test Timeouts: How They Work and How to Fix Them

"Timeout of 30000ms exceeded" is the most common Playwright error and the most commonly misdiagnosed. It rarely means your test is slow. It usually means an element never became actionable, and the timeout is simply where Playwright gave up waiting for a condition that was never going to be satisfied. This guide covers the six separate timeouts, which one you are actually hitting, and why raising the number is usually the wrong fix.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Proxy Chaining: How It Works and When It Helps

Proxy chaining routes your traffic through two or more proxies in sequence rather than one. The intuition is that more hops means more privacy. The arithmetic disagrees. Latency adds up, reliability multiplies downward, and the trust model improves less than you would think — because each operator in the chain still sees a hop. There is a design that does chaining properly, and it is not a stack of commercial proxies.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Make a HEAD Request with curl

`curl -I` sends a HEAD request. `curl -X HEAD` looks like it should do the same and does something subtly broken, which is a fine way to lose twenty minutes to a hanging terminal. The curl manual says so directly, and the reason is worth understanding because it applies to every method you might set by hand. This guide covers the correct syntax, the specification's rules about what servers may omit, and the cases where a HEAD tells you something a GET would not.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Proxy vs Firewall: What's the Difference?

A firewall decides whether traffic is permitted. A proxy makes requests on someone else's behalf. Those are different jobs, and most confusion between them comes from the fact that some products do both. They also sit at different layers, in different directions, for different reasons — and one of them is a security control while the other usually is not. This guide separates them properly, using the definitions from the standards rather than vendor marketing.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

SNKRS Proxies: An Honest Look at What They Can and Cannot Do

Searching for SNKRS proxies usually means one thing, and that thing is prohibited by Nike's terms in language that leaves no room for interpretation. It also does not work the way people think it does, because SNKRS draws are randomised rather than first-come-first-served. This article covers what the terms say, how the release mechanics actually work, and the narrow set of jobs where proxies genuinely have a place.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Proxies and Virtual Credit Cards: What They Actually Protect

Virtual cards and proxies get recommended together as a privacy setup. They address different halves of the problem, and neither does what most people assume. A virtual card hides your card number from a merchant. It does not hide you. A proxy hides your address from a website. It does not hide your payment. Used together without understanding, they mostly make your legitimate transactions look suspicious.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Show Response Headers with curl

curl hides response headers by default. Four options reveal them, and they differ in ways that matter more than the documentation suggests. One of them sends a different request than the one you are trying to debug, which is a fine way to spend an hour chasing a discrepancy that does not exist. This guide covers all four, plus the JSON output most people do not know about and how the picture changes through a proxy.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

XPath preceding-sibling: How It Works (With Examples)

`preceding-sibling` selects nodes that come before the context node at the same level of the tree. Simple enough — until you write `preceding-sibling::td[1]` and get a different cell than you expected. The reason is that `preceding-sibling` is a reverse axis, and position numbering on a reverse axis runs backwards. This guide covers what it selects, the numbering trap, how it differs from `preceding`, and the extraction patterns it exists to solve.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

JSON vs CSV: Which Format Should You Use?

The usual comparison says JSON is structured and CSV is simple. That is true and it misses the difference that causes real problems. JSON is a specification with mandatory rules. CSV is a description of what most implementations happen to do, written down after the fact. That asymmetry explains nearly every CSV problem you have ever had, and it should shape which format you pick.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Build an Aggregator Website: A Practical Guide

An aggregator is a website whose value comes from other people's content, organised better than they organised it. Jobs, property, prices, news, events. The interesting problems are not technical. Getting data is the easy part; deduplicating it, keeping it fresh, and staying on the right side of the law are where projects die. This guide covers the whole shape of it — data sources in order of preference, the legal layer, the architecture, and the failure modes.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Unblocking GoGuardian: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why

GoGuardian blocks a site and the obvious question is how to get round it. The obvious answer — a proxy or VPN — does not work in the situation most people are in, and it is worth understanding why. The filtering does not happen on the network. It happens inside the browser on the device. This guide covers what GoGuardian actually is, the legitimate routes to getting something unblocked, and the difference between a school-managed device and your own.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is Proxy Pricing? A Guide to How Proxies Are Billed

Proxy providers bill in at least four different ways, and the headline numbers are not comparable across them. A gigabyte and an IP address are not the same unit of anything. Which means the cheapest-looking provider is frequently the expensive one for your particular workload, and working out which is which takes about ten minutes of arithmetic. This guide covers the models, the hidden costs, the arithmetic, and the pricing patterns that should make you cautious.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best Twitter/X Proxies in 2026: An Honest Assessment

Before comparing proxy types for X, it is worth reading what X's own terms say about automated access. They are more explicit than any comparable platform. That reading changes the answer to "which proxies should I buy" for most people, and we would rather lead with it than bury it. What follows: the terms, the `robots.txt`, the narrow set of jobs where proxies remain sensible, and how to choose for those.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Download a File with curl (+Examples)

`curl -O https://example.com/file.zip` downloads a file. That command is also wrong in at least two ways that will eventually cost you an afternoon. It does not follow redirects, and it happily saves a 404 page as `file.zip` and exits successfully. This guide covers the options that make downloads reliable, the flags that prevent silent failures, and how to resume, parallelise and rate-limit properly.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is a 415 Status Code? Causes and Fixes

A 415 means the server understood your request and refused the format you sent the body in. It is not about your data being wrong — it is about the wrapper. Which is why the fix is almost always a header rather than a payload change, and why people who go looking in their JSON find nothing. This guide covers what the specification actually says, the handful of causes that account for nearly every case, and how to tell 415 apart from the three status codes it gets confused with.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

What Is a Proxy Port? A Practical Guide

A proxy port is the number after the colon in `proxy.example.com:8080`. It tells the server which service on that machine should handle your connection. That is the whole concept, and yet port confusion is one of the most common reasons a proxy configuration fails. This guide covers what the number means, why the familiar ones became familiar, what the official registry actually records about them — which is not what most people assume — and how to tell a port problem from everything else.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best Local LLMs in 2026: What to Run and on What Hardware

Running a capable language model on your own hardware stopped being a novelty some time ago. The question now is which one, on what, and whether you should bother. The honest answer depends far more on your VRAM and your licence requirements than on any benchmark table. Below: the models worth running, the licences that decide whether you can ship them, and the cases where a local model is the wrong choice.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

JSON.parse() in JavaScript: A Complete Guide

`JSON.parse()` turns a string into a JavaScript value. That is the entire API, and it takes about ten seconds to learn. The interesting parts are everything around it: the reviver function, the number precision loss that ships silently to production, the `__proto__` special case, and the recent standard addition that finally lets you see the original source text. This guide covers all of it, with the failure modes rather than just the happy path.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best YouTube Proxies in 2026

YouTube serves a different page to almost every visitor — different trending shelf, different ads, different availability. That variability is why teams doing ad verification, market research, localization QA, and public metadata collection reach for proxies. This guide covers which proxy type actually works on YouTube, what to check before you buy, what the work costs at three volume tiers, and how to set it up without tripping over the usual errors. Entry rates across the residential market span $0.79 to $7.00 per GB for the same category of product. Here is what that difference buys, and when it buys you nothing at all.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-01

Best Bing Rank Tracking Tools

Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025, which quietly removed the official route to Bing results and left every rank tracker relying on scraping. Meanwhile the free Bing Webmaster Tools API still reports your real average position from actual impressions — more accurate than any scraper, and almost nobody uses it. This guide covers what changed, what the free option gives you, what the paid tools cost for Bing specifically, and the honest case for not tracking Bing at all.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best Rank Tracking APIs

A rank tracking API gives you search engine results as structured data, on demand, without you having to fight bot detection yourself. The catch is that the same workload can cost $27 a month or $725 a month depending purely on which provider you pick — and the headline prices do not make that obvious. This guide covers the two very different products both sold as "rank tracking APIs", verified per-1,000 pricing from official pages, a worked cost model for a realistic keyword set, and the case where you should not buy one at all.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Undetectable.io Review: Is It Worth It in 2026?

Undetectable.io is an antidetect browser with a free tier, a generous mid-range plan and a name that promises more than any product in this category can deliver. This review covers what it actually does, what it costs as of September 2026, how it compares to the alternatives we have reviewed, and where the marketing outruns the engineering. It also clears up the confusion with a similarly named product that does something entirely different.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best TikTok Proxies in 2026: What Actually Works

Most people searching for TikTok proxies want one of four quite different things, and two of them are better served by TikTok's own APIs. The other two are real use cases where the type of proxy matters more than the brand on it. This guide separates them, quotes the terms of service rather than glossing over them, and says plainly where our own product is the wrong shape.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best Residential Proxy Providers in 2026

Residential proxy pricing runs from under a dollar to seven dollars a gigabyte for what is described as the same product, which tells you the headline rate is not measuring what you think. The number that decides your bill is cost per successful request, not cost per gigabyte — and a failed request costs bandwidth exactly like a successful one. This guide compares the main providers on pricing taken from their own live pages, explains the two structural traps nobody puts in comparison tables, and sets out the test that settles it in an afternoon.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best Datacenter Proxy Providers in 2026

Datacenter proxies are the cheap, fast option — often five to ten times less than residential, and noticeably quicker. The catch is that they are identifiable as datacenter addresses, which decides whether they work at all on a given target. This guide covers the billing model split nobody talks about (per-IP vs per-GB, which changes cost by an order of magnitude depending on your usage shape), how the main providers compare, and the test that tells you in ten minutes whether you need residential.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Unblock Crunchyroll: What Works and What Doesn't

"Crunchyroll is blocked" describes at least three unrelated situations. A school firewall, a licensing region lock, and a country where the service does not operate are different problems with different fixes. Only one of them is reliably solved by routing your traffic somewhere else. Another is covered by law, at least in Europe. The third often cannot be solved at all. Below: how to tell which one you have, and an honest account of what does and does not work for each.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Concurrency vs Parallelism: What's the Difference?

Concurrency is about dealing with many things at once. Parallelism is about doing many things at once. That is the textbook line, and on its own it explains nothing. The distinction becomes useful the moment you ask a practical question: why does adding threads make one program faster and another slower? This article answers that, with the specifics of how Python, Go and Node differ and how to tell which one your workload actually needs.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Best SimilarWeb Alternatives in 2026: Compared & Reviewed

Similarweb estimates how much traffic other people's websites get. That is a genuinely hard problem, which is why the tool costs what it costs and why the alternatives are less interchangeable than a comparison table suggests. Some replace it. Some replace one job it does, better and cheaper. Several excellent sources are free and almost nobody uses them. Below: verified pricing where vendors publish it, honesty where they do not, and a clear statement of what you cannot rebuild yourself.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

How to Set a Timeout with curl (+Examples)

curl will wait forever by default. There is no built-in overall time limit, so a request to an unresponsive host can hang until something else kills it. Two options fix that, and a third catches the case both of them miss. This guide covers all three with working commands. It also covers the interaction between timeouts and retries, which surprises almost everyone the first time a script takes ten minutes to fail.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

Why You Should Always Test Your Proxies

A proxy that returns a 200 and a foreign IP address can still be quietly ruining your data. The failure modes that cost real money almost never announce themselves. This piece is about the economics of testing rather than the mechanics: what breaks, how long it hides, and what the hiding costs you. It also covers the cases where testing is genuinely a waste of your afternoon, because those exist too.

Geonode Team

Published: 2026-09-02

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