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.
Curl is a very handy tool for downloading pretty much anything from a URL, and should be in every web developer’s toolkit. However, the sheer number of Curl options can be overwhelming. Here I give a quick summary of the most common options and a few typical examples.
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.
I didn’t realize there was a separate app for this, but had wondered if there was a way to return to browser downloaded files. Within Downloads, I found over 65MB of files, some of which I downloaded over a year ago. With a few taps I cleaned them all out. These are treated separately and outside of the browser cache, so if you download a lot you should periodically clean them up.