Keeping track of technical issues, bugs and tasks between companies can be a real hassle. In my current job we switched from emailing Excel spreadsheets to hosted JIRA (OnDemand) which costs only $10/month for up to 10 users.
Over this past Christmas break I spent some more time on Stack Overflow, answering some questions in a few areas I felt I could contribute. As I answered and contributed more, I saw how the reputation and badges system can really draw you in. Not as a motivator per se, but it’s fun to get “kudos” when someone finds your answers or edits helpful.
Curl is a very handy tool for downloading pretty much anything from a URL, and should be in every web developer’s toolkit. However, the sheer number of Curl options can be overwhelming. Here I give a quick summary of the most common options and a few typical examples.
I’ve created a simple webservice which echos back the request details, including request parameters and HTTP headers. Results can be returned in test, JSON, or XML formats, and source is on Github.