I recently switched to hosting all of my own websites. While it is liberating to have much more control over my web host, it begs for more maintenance time and better tools to help you monitor your server.

While browsing my GitHub account I came across Mark Sanborn’s site monitoring script and thought: “Hey this is a good idea, let’s see what I can make of it”. I have been meaning to post more Python here so I updated his code a bit and thought I’d share it with you. I hope you have ideas for improvements.

I have always wanted to give something back to the wonderful creators of the Remember The Milk to-do list service. It has been a great tool for me the past couple years by helping me keep organized. Thank you, RTM crew!

Over the last couple months I’ve been taking a bit of spare time to write something that I hope all of us can benefit from: GroovyRTM

I recently ran into a case where I was violating the DRY principle by having to encode part of a string every time I added to it. After some digging I found the solution: Groovy Categories.

A bit of Groovy background

A couple key features of Groovy are that everything is an object and that operators are just syntactic sugar for calling methods on the objects. What’s cool about this is that with Groovy you can override the default behavior of these operators for certain classes. For example, 4 + 2 in Groovy really means 4.plus(2)