Monthly Archives: December 2012

4 Useful cURL Tricks

cURL is pretty much the universal go-to tool for testing HTTP responses from the command line. If you’re not already familiar with it, here are a few handy things you can use it for.

Checking Headers

You can use cURL to see the headers sent in a request. I use this all the time to see if the headers I’m trying to send in a script are working right.

$ curl -I http://www.google.com
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2012 02:45:58 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
(...)

Sending POST Requests

I was working on a project recently that involved receiving POST requests from a client script running on another server. Since there was no convenient HTML form to use to repeatedly test changes made to the API, I ended up using cURL. Sending POST data is a simple matter of passing an argument that looks something like a query string.

curl http://example.org/url-to-recieve-post-request -d "name=Gandalf&type=wizard";

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Scratchpad

Scratchpad: Write HTML and Watch it Render Instantly

Scratchpad does exactly what it says on the proverbial box. It acts as a convenient place to experiment with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You get a two-pane screen with the page source on the left and a live-updated render on the right. As you…

mashable-rww-tnw-redesigns

A Strange and Sudden Design Trend

It’s weird. Practically overnight, several major blogs rolled out similar redesigns that follow this emerging trend that Usability Post has documented. Suddenly, Mashable, The Next Web and ReadWriteWeb all have new designs that feature prominent top bars (which are primarily statically positioned), responsive designs…

Jakob Nielsen Slams Windows 8 Usability

I’m not normally one to agree with Jakob Nielsen, but he really hit the nail on the head with his fresh rant panning Windows 8. He has seven main complaints, from the “double desktop” inconsistency and low information density to the overly flat UI…

BlogBuzz December 1, 2012