Dom runs https://littlewarden.com/, which monitors sites for upcoming issues and lets you know when you're about to publicly embarrass yourself. In a twist on eat-your-own-dog-food (eat someone else's dog food as a service?), he had set up alerts for HN in their system. Lo and behold, it delivered the goods, and that is why you're reading HN as usual today instead of certificate scoldings, and therefore also why my ass is in a saved state, which is how I like it.
I figure the least we can do is proclaim our thanks, so all hail Dom and Little Warden! Yes, I know most of you can do this in 3 lines of Python and a cron job, and yes yes, there are other alert services—but only one has personally helped you waste time unimpeded on the internet. That is all.
But now with Lets Encrypt & autocert(Go) it's not the case anymore. But still Little Warden would be useful to detect nasty surprises and besides you're offering other features.
P.S. I've added Little Warden to my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/#website .
Will you name drop them so I can be angry at their ethics for you?
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
Plus, do I need to publicly thank every person that emails and helps me?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-56099072
Dom is a legend in his own lunchtime. A hugely positive inspiration to everybody who has had the good fortune to meet him.
disneyland is for capitalist pigs
Very classy callout in any case. I love the story of a startup getting good press for doing something nice. Also this sounds like a really good case study for them to put up.
How does Littlewarden solve that problem? "Personally contacting the face of the site through a back channel" is a great answer, but not so scalable.
I can setup a monitor (FOSS) for the computer that is doing the site monitoring, since I only use open source software that I can inspect.
Just recently, I let one of my certificates expire. The cronjob correctly renewed it, but nginx was not reloaded and kept using the previous certificate. This had never happened before, because I would usually make changes regularly and trigger a reload, which would load the new certificate. Therefore this website had run without issues for 2 years with an incomplete renewal configuration until it finally broke...
Ultimate troll :) Maybe dang is the secret writer of n-gate
Hope they're okay, and just bored with writing updates.
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(for the curious)