httptools.dev

I have added more features in the past few weeks. Simple utilities from a developer's perspective, but nonetheless frustrating that there are so many different websites for them (and almost all of them are annoyingly bad). So I add some tools for encoding and encoding base64 and percent signing (url encoder), and hashing functions for commonly used hashing algorithms like SHA-1, SHA-2 and MD-5.

Revenue is not in sight yet. The plan is to add small, non-distracting ads like Carbon ads. But apart from my own time, costs are very low and I like the project so far as a pet project, so not having revenue is not a problem at all for now.

Also it is time to work on promotion. I drop some links at various places and I have started this IH blog!

Not much has happened on the site itself in the past month, although my friends liked it and had some useful suggestions. It is a real side-project: weeks go by without updates, and sometimes some big updates when I have the time and energy to work on it.

New features arrive. Because I recently had a problem with gzip compression, I add a new check to verify whether gzip compression and Brotli compression are working. Nothing spectacular, not something which didn't exist online, but useful to me and a way better alternative for all the slow, distracting checks which are now available.

Another tool which I would find useful is an HSTS check (HSTS is a method to indicate to browsers that a website is only accesible over secure connections). So I build that too, verifying my own sites and applications in the process (and learning a lot about this standard).

I don't spend much time promoting my site yet, as I don't consider it finished at all and it has little content.

I have started more side projects in the past (not yet listed on IH) and all of my side projects seem to start out of frustration. Frustration about information which I can't find. Frustration about cumbersome processed. Frustration abouw slow and distracting websites.

This time, a long lingering frustration has finally been bugging me enough to start a new side project. For my main gig, I'm redirecting a lot of old websites to a new domain and so I'm setting up a lot of redirects. There are various ways to check a redirect but many seem to be oriented to non-technical SEO folks, or they are old, slow sites with banners and commercial links all over the place. I just want to check whether my redirect is working!

I register a new domain name, https://httptools.dev/, and I start building on a simple application which checks redirects. And why not inspect HTTP headers too, as it is not much extra work and I actually would often use that too in my day-to-day work.

I start out with a basic Tailwind template (first time for me, but I like it straight away), Vue.js and vue-router, and a little API application in Laravel to make HTTP requests directly instead of through a browser.

Two weeks later, the site is working and live. I spread some links amongst my friends and that's it for now.