Archive for the ‘tools’ Category.

hurl: Simple service to initiate HTTP requests and trace its response

hurl Ever needed to examine a response for a given request? Here we go! hurl is a neat and simple web based service which allows us to initiate a customized HTTP request and presents the resulting response in a nicely formatted manner. Free, responsive and several configuration options.

This is how Chris and Leah – the creators of hurl – put it:

Hurl makes HTTP requests.

Choose the request method, customize headers and POST parameters, add basic authorization, and even follow redirects. Then view the nicely formatted request and response.

It’s the perfect tool for testing APIs. Just enter a URL and click send.

hurl0

Formatted request details (incl. followed redirects!)

hurl1

Formatted response example

Your daily personalized RSS magazine

Today I found what I was looking for quite a while now: A magazine-like feed reader. Tabbloid (from HP!!!) is an online tool which lets you subscribe to your favorite feeds and delivers them bundled as a PDF magazine right to your mailbox. Its up to you if you want it daily or weekly. The whole service is pretty simple as it consists of only one form (which is fully ajaxed) and does not require any registration. Now I’m proud to have an HP notebook ;)

I dont know about you guys, but I am having some feeds which I usually read on weekends cause they tend to write long detailed articles. Its them I’ve added to my magazine which is delivered right before the weekend every Friday noon. The days where I used to be sitting bored on my pool are over now :) Great idea, perfect solution! Google will follow soon ;)

Get an email notification if one of your sites is down

observuObservu is free service which informs you if one of your sites is down. Simple register all your websites with them and receive an email notification if one of them is dead. Nice!

What’s new in Rails 2.1?

If you want to know what’s new in Rails 2.1 or think that you may have missed a new feature, you should check out the e-book “Ruby on Rails 2.1. What’s new?“.

There are all new features described with an example. It’s quite amazing to see how rails evolves.
btw: did you know that there is finally an i18n patch in edge rails, to be released with rails 2.2? this is a solid foundation for other plugins to build on.

Query your Firefox cookies with SQL

Did you ever wanted to take a look at cookies or even tweak them? Having access to your cookies as a developer is crucial but even as a user it might be useful to take a look sometimes.

But what about querying them with sql queries? Picture this: Show me all cookies from localhost and order them by expirydate. No problem, I’ll show you how… Continue reading ‘Query your Firefox cookies with SQL’ »

Let your users vote on feature requests

Did you ever run a popular website or serivce/product? If yes, then you know how hard it can be to discover which new features your users want. Collecting all the requests, giving response and analyzing which requests are most popular. All those tasks require a lot of organization and take some time. UserVoice offers a serivce which provides exactly those features. For your site visitors:

  1. They submit ideas or vote for existing ideas
  2. They discuss ideas with each other and with you
  3. They get official reponse (featre planned, started, etc.)
  4. They get heard!

Perfect service! Will definitely use it in my future projects…

Google chart api introduces QR codes (2D bar codes) support

As usual the guys at google have been busy and released a nice new feature for their (quite new) google chart api. It support 2D bar codes also known as QR codes. Whats more, they even offer a free decoding library for it (Xzing). Big respect googlers to your free APIs

RSS feed for websites without RSS

Did you ever wanted to stay up to date with websites/pages which actually don’t offer any feed(s)? Yeah me too! page2rss.com/ is our life saver. It let us subscribe to any webpage and thus monitor all its changes. I love it! my sleepless nights are gone now, cause i know i won’t miss anything anymore …

New great free icon set

Many of you already know that the FamFamFam icons are probably the most famous out there. At least i know plenty of apps using it – including me. Today i have found a new great icon set from pro theme design including 117 icons:

iconsheetsmall.gif

Get Circular Icons here

Test your website on different browsers. Get even a screenshot of how it looks like in all of them!

Today a work collegue showed me a nice tool (website) called browsershots which tests a given website in all the browsers you want. The nice thing is that it really supports a hell lot of browsers (incl. different versions .. IE5, IE6, IE7, FF1.5, FF2.0, FF3) and that it shows you screenshots of how it looks like. I love it – because its a real mission to get all of them working locally on your machine .. especially the different IE versions :) I have tried using it with webdevbros and here is a screenshot of how it looks like after processing it for 3 minutes… Continue reading ‘Test your website on different browsers. Get even a screenshot of how it looks like in all of them!’ »