Alan’s Personal Techy Website
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Using Ngrok for Multiple Ports
Ngrok is a useful and easy way to expose your development machine to the internet. It’s primarily used for demonstrating your work to clients. Basic Usage At the simplest level, you would expose your localhost (port 80), and the client would access it via a domain. For example: This automatically provides you with an external…
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AI Application Specification Language
A Standard for AI-Driven Application Development Abstract In this paper I propose an AI Application Specification Language (AIASL) a standardized YAML-based specification language designed to bridge the gap between human intent and AI-powered application development. As AI systems increasingly participate in software development, a formal specification language becomes crucial for accurate interpretation and implementation of…
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How AI and IDEs Shaped My Coding Productivity in 2024: A Retrospective
The Role of AI in Development 2024 has been a transformative year for coding productivity, largely thanks to the rise of AI tools. This post reflects on my experiences with AI helpers and integrated development environments (IDEs) and how they’ve shaped my workflow. My Journey with IDEs: From JetBrains to VS Code (and Back Again)…
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Building Page Prism: A Simple Website Monitoring Solution
TL;DR: A web developer created Page Prism, a free website monitoring service, as a cost-effective alternative to Uptime Robot, offering simple text-based uptime checking every five minutes with email notifications. Intro As a provider of WordPress care plans, ensuring website uptime is crucial to my service offering. For years, I relied on Uptime Robot for…
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Can I log in to WordPress.org to support users of my free plugins?
A new mandatory checkbox WordPress.org login page creates a bit of an issue, as to support users of my free plugins I need to login, or to release updates and fixes I need to login in too. Also I have pledged to provide 5% of my time which I have been doing by providing general…
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Understanding Website Contact Form Spam: The Origins, Dangers, and How to Combat It
Spam is one of the oldest and most persistent problems on the internet. It clogs up our inboxes, invades social media feeds, and annoys us with unsolicited messages. But among the many types of spam, website contact form spam remains a particularly troublesome issue for website owners. So, why does contact form spam exist? What…