Blogging Techstacks

tools.techstacks.com Updates

It isn't the prettiest site out on the Internet but I've published some updates to the tools.techstacks.com site.  The site now displays in iphones, ipods, and android phones.  It doesn't look great but this version of the site is more of a learning experience for me in writing html webapps for handheld devices.  It would not have been possible without the assistance of the O'Reilly published book, "Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa " by Jonathan Stark. I would love to test it with my blackberry but my service is so poor at home, testing would literally take hours. 

The Techstacks Tools site is still powered by gaelyk, httpbuilder, and google app engine, I've tried to clean up as much of the HTML as I was able to find and separated the content from the presentation a little more.  The version of gaelyk the site runs on is 0.3.3 and appengine version for java is 1.3.5.  

Finally, this update includes my first stab at a tool for administrators, BadUrlChk.  More on this tool in the next post, which will be a milestone post for this blog—post number 300!

Bling v0.8 is Now Live

I've uploaded an update to bling, which is now an online tool running on Google App Engine.  I've removed the NewsGator and Bloglines ping endpoints temporarily until I can spend some time debugging these requests in order to figure out why they consistently fail.

New in this release is that bling now performs extended XMLRPC pings, so adding a Feed URL is now required.  Bling still utilizes the Gaelyk framework and runs on Google App Engine Java.

Since the soft launch back in the middle of January, the techstacks tools site has had about 60 visits from 15 countries around the world and I just wanted to thank those of you who have given it a try.  This is actually more than I had expected considering the only promotion is a few blog posts and hard-to-read link at the top right of this page.  I hope it has proven useful and I do appreciate any feedback any one has on it or the smping tool.

Semi-Official Techstacks Tools Launch

I've put up a new site running on Google App Engine:  Techstacks Tools.  Presently, there are a couple of tools there useful for web site administrators and bloggers but I have some ideas for some additional things that should get out on the site soon.  Right now, there are two mini-apps:

bling, which is a port of my blog ping script to run as a web application.  I'm not really sure if developing the command line script will continue unless folks want me to.  I would appreciate any feedback.

smping, which is a subset of bling that is meant for sending out sitemap pings to search engines when a web site has been updated, but the site in question is not a blog (so there is no need to send notifications out to. 

I use both presently whenever I post changes to my blog and to the HOWTO site and they both seem to work well.  I will need to make some additional changes to them in the near future to get a contact form working and to make the required fields actually be required but for version 0.7.5, I'm pretty happy so far.