Alright first off if you’re in the market for an electric standing desk, you’ll notice to take ownership of this flagship of technological innovation that is a “standing desk” you’ll need to shell out five Benjamins (or more!). That just wasn’t a price that screamed “value” to me. So I set out on the digital trail to see what could be pieced together with help from the Amazon and Ikea overlords of furniture and retail. Heres the journey…and the desk! (more…)
Follow @Tim_LelandCategory: How To
Marketing To Developers
If you’re a developer and have ever tried to market your own app or website, you’ve most likely discovered that the biggest challenge isn’t the building but the marketing of your app. When trying to come up with creative ways to spread the word about my weather extension, I came across Justin Jackson. Justin has a great story (video) of how he has been able to go independent selling books and courses on helping developers market their products. He offers a lot of free content with some great tips and strategies. (more…)
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Animated Badge Icon
Weather Extension was recently updated to have a spinning indicator in the badge icon to let the user know the extension is loading when it is clicked. I wanted to give the user immediate feedback. The challenge was that the badge toolbar icon is limited to static images. I was able to get around this by using canvas and generating multiple images that update the icon. I’ve haven’t come across anything like this so I thought I would share. (more…)
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Global Git Ignore
Recently I was trying to add some folders to my global .gitignore file on windows. Unfortunately I ran into some issues. After some searching, I couldn’t come across a solution that worked for me. Here are the steps that worked for me.
Add to Global Git ignore Windows
- git config –global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global (Add .gitignore_global as the global gitignore file in your global git config)
- notepad %USERPROFILE%\.gitignore_global (Create and edit .gitignore_global in your home directory using cmd)
Add to Global Git ignore Mac
- git config –global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global (Add .gitignore_global as the global gitignore file in your global git config)
- sudo nano ~/.gitignore_global (can edit your .gitignore_global file and add any files or folder you would like to ignore. Use ctrl + y to save and exit)
Leave a comment if these steps helped in any way!
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Stress Test with Loader.io
Ever wonder how many requests your $5 a month Digital Ocean server can handle? Using Loader.io’s free load testing tool can help you do just that! It’s a good idea to know what your server can handle so you can be prepared to handle large spikes in traffic. This could mean increasing the specs on your current server, adding a load balancer or using round robin dns to distribute the request to multiple servers. (more…)
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Round Robin DNS
In a previous post, I’ve covered how I used Digital Ocean’s load balancer to handle the increasing number of request my Weather Extension receives. For weeks everything was going great but about a month ago I started having issues with DO load balancer. Users were receiving 522 (timeouts) errors. DO claimed my servers were the issue. After some testing, I realized that around 1,000 requests a minute, Digital Ocean’s load balancer started failing even though they claim to not limit the number of requests. (more…)
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Easy Smoothie Recipe
A recent Freakonomics episode on the dangers of sugar, spark the idea for me to share my fruit smoothie recipe I’ve been making for the past 2 years. If you struggle with drinking sugary drinks, switching to fruit smoothies may help you curve your habit. (more…)
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DigitalOcean Load Balancers
Performance and reliability are two key factors that contribute to a user being happy when using a website/app. They tend to not be forgiving when a website fails to load especially when it comes to browser extensions. If it doesn’t work the first time, they often uninstall. (more…)
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How to Market Browser Extensions
For the past year and a half I’ve been testing different ways to market my Weather Extension. Currently Weather has over 125,000 users. Here are some of the strategies that have worked well for me: (more…)
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Nginx Real Time Metrics
To get a better idea of how my server for Weather was handling request, I needed a way to get some insights into nginx. I wanted to calculate request per second and routes being accessed. I came across a great tool call ngxtop, a real-time metrics for nginx server. After a few commands ngxtop was up and running on my Digital Ocean Forge server. (more…)
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