Fixing a Broken Service With a Tiny Bit of Automation

This post is a nice, unintentional follow-up to yesterday’s one about backing up all of my family’s photos and home videos. Anyway… My kids go to a fantastic daycare. My wife and I couldn’t be happier. The teachers are wonderful, they love our children, and our kids adore them, too. But, the third-party service the … Read more

Backing Up Everything (Again)

This will take a while. Bear with me. I’m obsessive about backing up my data. I don’t want to take the chance of ever losing anything important. But that doesn’t mean I’m a data hoarder. I like to think I’m pragmatic about it. And I don’t trust anyone else to do it for me. From … Read more

A Simple, Open-Source URL Shortener

tl;dr One evening last week, I built pretty much the simplest URL shortening service possible. It’s simple, fast, opinionated, keeps track of click-thru stats, and does everything I need. It’s all self-contained in a single PHP script (and .htaccess file). No dependencies, no frameworks to install, etc. Just upload the file to your web server … Read more