I’ve been working on a new site called Weather.io. Besides being on an awesome io domain name thanks to park.io, it’s a simple site that displays a weather-related background image and the current weather conditions. It also supports changing locations and F/C options. I’m working on adding new features and would love to hear what people think.
Leave a comment below of what you would like to see in a simple weather site.
I’ve been experimenting with headless chrome for a Link Unshortener tool I’ve built to take screenshots of websites. I’ve been using BrowserShot which is great. It’s a php wrapper around Puppeteer which makes it simple to use in Laravel. To experiment more with Puppeteer, I wanted to get a node app running on Heroku. Overall it’s pretty straight forward but there are a few gotchas.
Here is a sample project that should get you started. Clone this and take a look at the source. You’ll notice I specified the node.js version in the package.json file. This is required for Heroku to know what version of node to use. Another issue I ran into is to run Puppeteer on Heroku you have to specify –no-sandbox. They last hurdle was adding the puppeteer Heroku buildpack. Follow the steps below and you should have a working screenshot app running locally and on Heroku. These instructions assume you are familiar with node and Heroku. Read More
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. Read More
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. Read More