Recently in Software Category

I recently started using Mover.io to back up my blog. Mover is a relatively new service which can migrate or back up between several different cloud services. I'm starting to use it as part of my backup strategy, making sure even files I have "in the cloud" are located in more that one service. To demonstrate the steps, here's a short screencast in which I add a regular backup task from part of my blog to the Box cloud service, (Read More)

It's that time of the year again - Advent calendars for many tech communities. As in past years, I've gathered a few here that should be interesting... (Read More)

Importing table-formatted data from web pages is a very handy feature of Microsoft Excel, and probably not very well known. To demonstrate the steps, I made two short videos covering both Windows and Mac versions of Microsoft Excel... (Read More)

Here's a list of all the technical podcasts I'm currently listening to - my "top 7". I have a longer commute now and whether in the car or the train, I've had lots of time to keep up. I've branched out and tried a LOT of different shows but these are the ones I've stuck with... (Read More)

Several months ago I shared my script for exporting Twitter friends into CSV format, suitable for importing into Excel or other spreadsheet programs. This week I made some slight improvements to my gist and discovered that someone else had forked it to create a version that exports your followers as well. The modified version for finding your followers is available... (Read More)

Zapier is an interesting service I’ve been playing with lately. It’s somewhat similar to IFTTT, but with more of a business focus. In their words: Zapier enables you to automate tasks between other online services (services like Salesforce, Basecamp, Gmail, and 224 more). Imagine capturing Wufoo form leads automatically into Salesforce or displaying new Paypal sales in your Campfire team... (Read More)

File hosting services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and Box all have very generous free storage levels (2 GB and up). Even so, it’s easy to quickly reach the free limit, especially as you start backing up photos, movies, and other large files. If you’re getting close to your service’s free limit, here’s a solution for quickly finding the largest... (Read More)

One month ago I launched Tweetfave - my new service which improves the usefulness of Twitter favorites. After using Tweetfave myself for so long, it's been exciting to open it up for others, and to see where it goes. Here's a quick look at some numbers since the launch 30 days ago... (Read More)

Here's a brief history of Tweetfave - my new free service that automatically emails your Twitter favorites to your inbox. This project started as one of those "wouldn't it be useful if..." projects, as an addition to Twitter. I was already using the Twitter favorite feature to bookmark tweets and links to read later, and wanted a way to automatically receive those (short of going to my profile page and viewing my own favorites). Combine that with an interest in learning the Twitter API, and the project was underway. As I started writing this, I was a bit surprised as to just how long I've been working on this. Here's the history timeline I came up with... (Read More)

With my Tweetfave project finally launched and starting to get a little bit of usage, I thought I'd summarize some of the key building blocks for this project. First of all, what does Tweetfave actually do? It periodically checks your Twitter account to look for new tweets you have marked as favorite. If you have any new ones, it sends them to your email inbox. The functionality is very simple, but I've found it to be a handy addition to Twitter, turning favorites into a sort of "read it later" bookmarking feature. Following are some of the software tools and services I used to build Tweetfave... (Read More)