Ever since I’ve moved to my own server for my websites, I’ve wanted to reduce the number of HTTP requests per user as much as possible. Here is how I (and you) can use Python to shave 1 more request off that number.
I can do this (and remove a DNS lookup) by updating my Feedburner count using an automated script on my server instead of having each client request it.
Using the FeedBurner Awareness API
Most of the time you only care about getting your total subscribers at the moment. The FeedBurner Awareness API is far more capable than just doing that, but we’re going to keep it simple today.
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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.
Checking site availability with Python
I didn’t feel that this script was big enough to go full OO with it, but if you want to add to it, fork the gist on GitHub and provide a link in the comments. You know what’d really be cool is if someone used timeit to get the response time and set thresholds for when the site is too slow.
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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
What is GroovyRTM?
GroovyRTM allows you to easily take advantage of the Remember The Milk REST API using any language on the JVM. In short, you can now write apps for Remember The Milk without having to worry about all the HTTP transaction stuff, error handling, etc. As its name implies, it’s written in Groovy, which made it much easier to write and test. Continue reading →