Guides
Practical explainers for getting the most out of tomai.uk tools.
Our guides explain how tomai.uk tools work, how to keep your data private, and how to pick the right free or premium tool for your task. Each guide is written for real users, not search engines, and stays up to date as the site grows. Start with the free-vs-premium comparison if you are new, or jump straight to the privacy guide if you want to understand what happens to your files. We keep the advice practical and concise so you can act on it immediately, whether you are converting a file, checking a website, or automating a workflow.
Free tools vs. premium AI & cloud tools
Understand the difference between free browser-based tools and credit-metered AI or cloud processing.
How tomai.uk handles your data
What stays in your browser, what goes to the server, and how long we keep it.
How to choose the right tool
A simple decision framework for picking between free, cloud, and AI tools on tomai.uk.
JSON vs YAML vs XML: choosing the right format
Three data formats, three personalities. When strictness, human editing, or document structure matters — and how to convert between them safely.
How IP blacklist and proxy detection actually works
Datacenter ranges, abuse histories, shared egress and fingerprints — what IP purity means and why innocent users sometimes get flagged.
Unix timestamps: the four traps that break your dates
Seconds vs milliseconds, UTC vs local time, DST shifts and locale parsing — where timestamp bugs come from and how to avoid them.
Base64 is encoding, not encryption — five myths worth dropping
No key, no secrecy, a third more bytes, and a URL-safe twin: what Base64 actually does and the mistakes people keep making with it.
What a JWT leaks — and why not to paste production tokens online
Signatures prevent tampering, not reading: the payload is readable by anyone, the pitfalls of alg=none, and how to inspect tokens safely.
The meta tags that actually matter for SEO
Title length, description that earns clicks, canonical, robots, social cards and hreflang — a working checklist, not folklore.