I finally had to turn off the public number for my free Weather by Text service which I’ve been running for a few years. I was fine with the minimal cost running this on Twilio, but over the last couple of months someone has been abusing the number presumably with some automated script. The challenge with Twilio SMS is there is no way to block any abusive incoming text messages. Even though the pricing is pretty cheap ($ 0.0075 per message), it adds up quickly because you’re charged for both the incoming and outgoing messages. In the end, it’s not…
Website monitoring (or uptime monitoring) is essential for any commercial website or service and there are plenty of commercial vendors that provide these services. With the recent rollout of GitHub Actions, I’ve put together a simple lightweight website monitor you can implement for free, perfect for side projects and personal websites. In addition to this WordPress blog I’m using it to watch my parked domains and Tweetfave project, making sure they are alive and well.
I recently fixed my Weather by Text mini project to get it working again (since Yahoo shut down YQL) and to update with a few improvements. This service is a simple Twilio-based service which delivers the current weather for the location you send via text message.
Recently I’ve been trying to ramp up my cloud knowledge, specifically around Amazon’s web services (AWS). Earlier this month I passed the certified cloud practitioner test and the thing that really stuck with me was how much more effective it was to actually use the services rather than just reading about them.
I recently pass my first ever technical certification and now I’m officially an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner! Read on for more details and my thoughts on whether this was worthwhile.