I spent some of this week working with an old friend – wget. For those that don’t know, wget is a command line tool to query a remote website and get the response (a web page, or whatever). Anyway, in my case, I was tasked to build a tool to check various URL’s and send alerts if any were not responding or responding incorrectly. With php, I should have been able to the built in curl functions, but couldn’t figure out how to make curl use the system proxy settings (some urls needed to go through a proxy). Anyway, sometimes I go with what works, rather than beat my head against a wall for too long.

Also, I moved this website to hostgator, an old hosting friend. For a long time I’d had the site on AWS, to learn more about cloud services. But AWS doesn’t give all the bells and whistles of a hosting platform out of the box, and it just got too tedious to get set up. Who wants to set up a load balancer just to add SSL to your website anyway?

So it was a week of old friends, if you can call technology a friend!