Tankless Water Heater DeScaling

If you have a tankless water heater, make sure you descale it every couple of years. They sell kits, but you can do it yourself with a 5-gallon bucket, a pair of washer hoses, 2-4 gallons of white vinegar, and a 1/4hp submersible pump.

Hard water contains minerals that can lead to limescale build-up. As lime builds up in the unit, the exchanger needs to work harder and provide hot water. This can significantly shorten the lifespan of this component and cause a marked increase in your utility bills. To make matters worse, the lime buildup isn’t covered in most warranties. As a general rule, your tankless water heater should be flushed once per year to maintain efficiency. However, the hardness of your water plays a part in this, and you may find it better to flush every couple of years. If you follow the steps in the video below, you will save yourself money by doing it yourself, and your tankless water heater will last longer. Make sure you read the manual for your model before attempting to do this yourself. Read More

Adding New Permissions To Chrome Extension

Wanted to share a quick tip to save you a lot of frustration if you are a Chrome extension developer. Never add a new permission to an existing extension that has “warnings” especially if you have a decent amount of users. If you do, your extension will be disabled for all users. They can reenable but you may lose some users that never reenable the extension. Here is a list of permissions that will disable your extension when updating.

This can be avoided by making the new feature optional and adding new permission updates to optional_permissions in your manifest file. Read More

Link Unshortener

Link Unshortener is a tool to get information about a link before visiting it. As a safety practice, you should always check links that you are not familiar with before you visit them. Link Unshortener shows you the final destination and any security concerns when you expand a shortened link. You never know where a short URL is going to take you. Browsing with Link Unshorten will check the site for malicious content and alert you before you visit a suspicious site. Read More

Subdomain or Subfolder for Blog?

When deciding if a blog for T.LY link shortener, should be on a separate domain, I reached out to IndieHackers to get their opinion. I originally was going to use my tdotly.com domain for the blog and marketing site but decided to just use blog.t.ly and /blog redirects on T.LY from all the feedback. This is primarily for SEO reasons to consolidate authority to a single domain. Google claims that sub-domains are not worst/better compared to a subfolder if this is easier for your server setup. Just make sure you add both sites to Google Search Console. Read More