Brian Cantoni

File hosting services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and Box all have very generous free storage levels (2 GB and up). Even so, it’s easy to quickly reach the free limit, especially as you start backing up photos, movies, and other large files. If you’re getting close to your service’s free limit, here’s a solution for quickly finding the largest... (Read More)

One month ago I launched Tweetfave - my new service which improves the usefulness of Twitter favorites. After using Tweetfave myself for so long, it's been exciting to open it up for others, and to see where it goes. Here's a quick look at some numbers since the launch 30 days ago... (Read More)

Here's a brief history of Tweetfave - my new free service that automatically emails your Twitter favorites to your inbox. This project started as one of those "wouldn't it be useful if..." projects, as an addition to Twitter. I was already using the Twitter favorite feature to bookmark tweets and links to read later, and wanted a way to automatically receive those (short of going to my profile page and viewing my own favorites). Combine that with an interest in learning the Twitter API, and the project was underway. As I started writing this, I was a bit surprised as to just how long I've been working on this. Here's the history timeline I came up with... (Read More)

With my Tweetfave project finally launched and starting to get a little bit of usage, I thought I'd summarize some of the key building blocks for this project. First of all, what does Tweetfave actually do? It periodically checks your Twitter account to look for new tweets you have marked as favorite. If you have any new ones, it sends them to your email inbox. The functionality is very simple, but I've found it to be a handy addition to Twitter, turning favorites into a sort of "read it later" bookmarking feature. Following are some of the software tools and services I used to build Tweetfave... (Read More)

Tweetfave is a free service to help you get more out of Twitter favorites. Tweetfave monitors your Twitter feed and sends the tweets you mark as favorite to your inbox. I built Tweetfave for myself ("scratching my own itch") and it's really helped me track and remember interesting tweets and links. It's especially useful when reading my Twitter feed on a mobile phone. If I don't have the time (or patience) to read linked articles on the phone, I'll mark the tweet as a favorite, knowing it will arrive later in my inbox. (Read More)

For the past 10+ years I have hosted this website and my other side projects through pair Networks. I’m also managing all of my domain names through the sister company pairNIC. As of today (2 more domains registered!) I have 17 domain names, 7 of which have live websites. The rest are on my “todo” project list. I’ve been very... (Read More)

As part of my Tweetfave project, I wanted to get a better sense of the people I’m following and whether they use the Twitter “favorites” feature. By using the Twitter API, I’m able to first fetch my list of friends (i.e. people I am following), then get the detailed stats for each one. The result is a CSV file which... (Read More)

Some email clients like Thunderbird will sometimes show a scam warning message on emails which appear to be normal and not suspicious. The Thunderbird warning is two-part: first an inline message “This message may be a scam, and second a modal dialog which appears when you click on any link in the email. Combined this could be worrisome for users... (Read More)

Downcast is an excellent podcast app for iPhones, much better than the Apple Podcast app. Read more for a quick summary of my favorite features, and my #1 suggestion: emailing show notes after listening to each podcast episode. (Read More)

I'm working on a documentation project where I might need to convert some existing HTML pages back into text or Markdown format for the new system. Rather than manually editing the HTML source, I'm testing with a couple different ways to script it automatically. In this blog post, I'm using a documentation page for our GoToMeeting API method and testing the Lynx text browser and Pandoc document conversion utility. (Read More)