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.
This weekend I learned an important lesson: don’t try to make a double phone switch moments before leaving home for the weekend. The call to Sprint went well enough and she assured me the changes would take effect within 4 hours. They didn’t, of course, because the agent had skipped the important part where I need to reprogram my phone with the new number. She said it wasn’t necessary, so I went along…doh, big mistake. Coming home late Sunday night I discovered the next surprise: Sprint customer service is not open 24/7. On Sundays, for example, they’re only online from…
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wrote in to let me know that an older project of mine which provides a simple webservice echo test was referencing some out of date projects.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…
I was sad to see this week that Yahoo! Pipes will be closing soon. Pipes launched in early 2007, so it had a pretty good 8+ year run. People created some pretty crazy mashups with Pipes. For me the simple ability to combine RSS feeds with some simple logic was very useful (for example: 2014 Tech Advent Calendars). I also recently created some Stack Overflow feed tools for work which will have to be recreated in Python or something similar. The news was part of a broader product update from Yahoo: Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization. Also…
I successfully migrated this website from MovableType 4.35 to WordPress 3.8.1. These are my notes from the migration in case they are helpful for anyone else. The good news is this is pretty straightforward, and there are plenty of notes out there (just search the internet for “WordPress MovableType import”). The tricky parts are the custom or special areas of your MovableType installation, and mine was no exception. First, why switch to WordPress? I wanted something more current with a stronger platform of plugins and themes. I’ve been happy with MovableType and stuck through it over many versions and changes.…