How to Use GitHub Pages for Parked Domains

For domain names I’ve reserved but haven’t done anything with yet, I like to have them parked with my own simple landing page rather than one of those ad-filled “parked domain” pages hosted by the registrar. Previously I had set mine up on a Digital Ocean VM. This wasn’t too difficult (and had a side benefit of forcing me to brush up on my Apache HTTP Server skills) but I’ve switched to a much easier method: hosting for free via GitHub Pages. This is not only free in terms of cost, but also time because it’s very simple to set…

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HTTP Request Inspectors

Someone wrote in to let me know that an older project of mine which provides a simple webservice echo test was referencing some out of date projects. My HTTP test service doesn’t use any of those other services, but I’ve updated the blog post description to point to some new options for comparison purposes. The original hosted version of RequestBin (at requestb.in) is no longer live. This was run by Runscope at the time and the source code is still up on GitHub (Runscope/requestbin). You can see their the status change: We have discontinued the publicly hosted version of RequestBin…

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Posted in: Web

Tweetfave Support for Longer Tweets

Tonight I spent a couple hours troubleshooting a problem with my Tweetfave service and handling of links. Luckily I discovered it was a simple matter of keeping up with Twitter’s API changes. This service has been running so smoothly and the API has actually been pretty stable. I needed to dust off my PHP skills and dig in to track down and adapt to an important change. Background Tweetfave is a free service which monitors the tweets you mark as favorites (now referred to as “likes”), then sends them to you by email. Currently the system stats show over 250…

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Posted in: Web

Tech Advent Calendars – 2016

It’s that time of the year again and I’m happy to see Advent calendars for many tech communities are still going strong. As in past years (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and for some reason skipped 2015), I’ve gathered a few here that I’ll be following this year: 24 ways (web design & development) – Feed awsadvent (Amazon Web Services) – Feed JVM Advent (Java language and JVM) – Feed Perf Planet (performance) – Feed Perl Advent Calendar 2016 (Perl language) – Feed sysadvent (System admin topics) – Feed UXmas (UX for everyone) – no RSS feed In years past I…

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Posted in: Web

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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