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)
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)
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. (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)
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. (more)
Taking screenshots from an Android device is similar to other platforms, although a bit more setup is needed. With a little bit of additional editing, your screenshots can look clean and professional. To get your PC ready for taking Android screenshots, refer to addictive tips for a good set of instructions; setting up a Mac is a similar process. In... (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)
