Keeping track of technical issues, bugs and tasks between companies can be a real hassle. In my current job we switched from emailing Excel spreadsheets to hosted JIRA (OnDemand) which costs only $10/month for up to 10 users. (more)
Recently in Web Category
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. (more)
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. (more)
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. (more)
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. (more)
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... (more)
I’ve been a big fan of the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, in particular their monthly online magazine. The magazine are downloadable in PDF, .mobi, and .epub formats, and browsable online in HTML format. Browsing through the latest couple of issues, I noticed a distinct slowness as some of the images were downloaded. This is usually a hint that a high resolution... (more)
After my team launched a new site design and blog system for the [Yahoo! Developer Network][ydn], I decided to review the performance of this site to see where it could be improved. In summary, after removing one performance-hogging widget (Lijit search widget) and following recommendations from YSlow and Page Speed, the site should be running much faster now. (more)