websites

Yesterday André Costa emailed me about his new website, rpilocator.

It's a website to track Raspberry Pi 4 model B, Compute Module 4, Pi Zero 2 W, and Pico availability across multiple retailers in different countries.

In his own words:

This database was created out of frustration trying to locate a Raspberry Pi product in the height of the chip and supply chain shortages of 2021. I got tired of visiting multiple websites every day trying to figure out if there were any Raspberry Pi's in stock. I coded this website in a few days during my spare time and had it hosted on a Raspberry Pi for a couple of weeks before deciding to make it publicly available. This is not hosted on a Raspberry Pi anymore.

About two decades ago, I built a website for the National Junior Classical League's individual website competition. This website, JJJCL, won a 2nd place award for how blindingly brilliant it was. I kept the site puttering along as I moved my static HTML site content from 'homepage.mac.com' to a personal bare metal webserver I ran for a few years, then eventually moved it to the server where I hosted this site (jeffgeerling.com).

But along the transition of this site from Drupal 6 to 7, it seems like that site dropped off the face of the Internet. And with it, part of my (embarrassing, design-wise? sure) history on the web. Luckily, I have archives of practically everything I've ever created, so today I'm happy to announce I have restored that part of my personal history to the Internet, along with another purpose-built static HTML site I built in Apple's short-lived iTools HomePage:

My sister's family just started a new St. Louis-area business, The Easy Chicken, providing resources to those interested in raising chickens in an urban or suburban environment.

There are some potentially difficult and time-consuming aspects to keeping chickens in an urban environment: acquiring chickens, seeking permits or licenses from particular municipalities, finding a source for feed, coops, and other materials, and finding reliable information about keeping chickens healthy. The Easy Chicken's tagline is Backyard eggs made easy, and they have the easy part nailed down, as they'll help anyone through all the different steps, and provide all the necessary supplies (including guaranteed-to-lay hens!).

Aquinas and More, a great Catholic store that had probably the best selection of Catholic goods available online, seems to be going out of business soon. This is unfortunate, because that means I'll have to go to Catholic Ripoff Supply more often (and their website needs major improvement). Ah well.

For now until they run out of inventory, they're having a 20% off sale on almost everything.

Wow. Just glanced at stats for 2008-now on jeffgeerling.com, and it looks like I've passed 3,000,000 page views, with more than 1.6 million unique visitors (I didn't keep stats from 2004-2008, so I don't have data for that time).

Thanks for all your visits, and for helping me improve this site through your feedback! I've received over 1,500 comments and 1,000 emails over the course of 800 blog posts, 60 articles, 31 reviews, and 1,100 photos posted to this site. I've written over 40,000 words in the posts on this site (not yet enough for a novel), and I've written similar amounts for sites like Open Source Catholic and Midwestern Mac.

One of my greatest dilemmas is whether to consolidate sites like those into this site, or to try to keep Life is a Prayer more about personal things, marriage, family life, etc. Here's to another 40,000 words figuring it out!

Midwestern Mac is proud to announce Server Check.in—a website and server monitoring service that is inexpensive and easy to use.

Server Check.in was built because, while there are some really powerful and flexible monitoring solutions out there, like Pingdom (we love Pingdom!), there aren't any really simple and inexpensive services that are better for individuals and small businesses who don't have a budget for more expensive and involved solutions, but still need to know when their servers or sites go down.

Server Check.in offers many features like free, unlimited SMS messages for outage notices, email notifications, and server latency monitoring. It will check on up to five servers or websites every fifteen minutes, and notify you when the servers and sites go down.

Sign up here for only $15/year—that's just $1.25 per month!

I meant to post this sooner, just never had time to get around to it... there's a new Catholic Meme site around, aptly named Catholic Memes. An example of what you'll find browsing the site:

There's tons more where that came from. The site is a bit like an expanded LOLSaints; whereas LOLSaints.com centers around the lives of the saints, and incorporates little snippets of info about each saint pictured, Catholic Memes puts the message in the meme. Some may call that a bit more shallow, but I think they're funny nonetheless—with a healthy dose of sarcasm!

Lately I've been working on finishing a few side projects – some websites, some apps, etc., and I thought I'd list off a few of the things I've done lately here for posterity: