Over 1 Million Tweets Delivered by Tweetfave

My Tweetfave side project has just passed a major milestone – over 1 million Tweets delivered! Tweetfave is a simple service which sends emails with all tweets you’ve marked as favorites (or in today’s terminology “liked”). I launched this publicly over 6 years ago in May 2013 and it’s been running along quietly since then. The chart below shows the cumulative total number of tweets delivered through the service. At the end of August 2019 we just passed the 1 million mark (on pace for about 1.1 million by the end of the year): It’s kind of impressive the amount…

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Converting HTML to Markdown using Pandoc

Markdown is a great plain text format for a lot of applications and is often used to convert to HTML (for example on my WordPress blog here). There are also some good use cases for the opposite: converting from HTML into Markdown. I recently had such a case to convert some older blog posts from raw HTML into Markdown found that Pandoc made it really easy. What’s Pandoc Pandoc is an open-source utility for converting between a number of common (and rare) document types, for example plain text, HTML, Markdown, MS Word, LaTeX, wiki, and so on. The output formats…

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DataStax Installer with Vagrant

I’ve continued to make improvements to my “Cassandra on Vagrant” project (Using Vagrant for Local Cassandra Development) which shows how to install open-source Cassandra or DataStax Enterprise in a variety of different ways. Using Vagrant is very helpful for local development and testing. Virtual images can be created very quickly and can be erased when done, keeping your primary development system clean. Recently I added an example which uses the DataStax Enterprise (DSE) standalone installer which first appeared in DSE 4.5. The standalone installer normally runs in a graphical UI mode, but can also be run in an unattended mode…

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Tech Advent Calendars – 2014

Update: For the latest, check out Tech Advent Calendars – 2016 It’s that time of the year again – Advent calendars for many tech communities. As in past years (2011, 2012, 2013), I’ve gathered a few here that should be interesting: * Perf Planet Advent (performance) – Feed * 24ways Advent (web design/development) – Feed * Perl Advent (Perl language) – Feed * Java Advent (Java language) – Feed * UXMas (UX for everyone) – Feed * SysAdvent (Sysadmin) – Feed I have a combined RSS feed (created with Yahoo! Pipes) that picks up all of these advent calendars: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TechAdventCalendars.…

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Quick Guide to Vagrant on Amazon EC2

Here’s a really quick guide to using Vagrant to create virtual machines on Amazon Web Services EC2. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Vagrant for local development, but sometimes it’s helpful to build out VMs in the cloud. (In particular, if your local machine isn’t very powerful.) These steps assume you already have Vagrant installed and have an Amazon Web Services account (and know how to use both). Installation First you’ll need to install the Vagrant AWS plugin: vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws vagrant box add dummy https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-aws/raw/master/dummy.box Next login to your Amazon AWS console to get a few…

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