Over this past Christmas break I spent some more time on Stack Overflow, answering some questions in a few areas I felt I could contribute. As I answered and contributed more, I saw how the reputation and badges system can really draw you in. Not as a motivator per se, but it’s fun to get “kudos” when someone finds your answers or edits helpful.
I’ve created a simple webservice which echos back the request details, including request parameters and HTTP headers. Results can be returned in test, JSON, or XML formats, and source is on Github.
Several awesome tech and programming communities create advent calendars each year with a different article or demo for each day of December. Here are the ones I’m following.
Splunk is an enterprise-grade software tool for collecting and analyzing log files and other data. They have a free version which is great for personal projects or smaller websites. In this blog post I explain how to use Splunk on standard Apache logs to explore your data, and an example of a misbehaving bot that I identified and was able to block.
For a side project I’m working on, I want to support several different “read it later” type applications. Looking for apps that have both mobile support and APIs, it looks like the most popular options are Instapaper, Read It Later, and Readability. All of these accomplish a similar task: bookmark a web page for later reading, and formatting it for easier reading. Mobile support is usually included, either for reading articles bookmarked earlier, or marking new ones to read on a desktop at a later time. Here’s a quick summary of each service: Instapaper Free service with an optional subscription…