Fun Links 2014-09-26

A bit of a random collection today. Hopefully useful, although not necessarily very Orbis related.

Digital Ocean
https://www.digitalocean.com (referral link)
I realized that I haven’t mentioned Digital Ocean before, and that is a shame because I find them to be an excellent VPS provider. If you want a quick and easy Linux cloud machine (known as a droplet), then look no further. They support a basic set of Linux distros as images, but they also have some application images as well. Need to get a LAMP or MEAN stack up and running quickly? Not a problem. Or for me, I created a Wordpress droplet (took about a minute) which I then had ready in a couple of minutes to test my md2sp tool. After I was finished testing, I destroyed the image and the whole thing only cost me 13¢. That was even cheaper than free when you consider the time it saved. I will mention that they have recently dropped support for Arch Linux, which I prefer, so if that is a factor, consider Linode.

Webhook
http://www.webhook.com
“Webhook is the easiest way to build custom, editable websites.” An interesting project that just came through Kickstarter, it is a CMS which builds down to a static site. Their business model essentially is their hosting, which ties into the product for a simple end to end experience. It is also open source and you can self-host for free. I’ve not had a chance to dig into this yet, but it seems promising.

katon
https://github.com/typicode/katon
Katon is a system (for the Mac) to manage your development servers and apps that you run locally and host them at a .ka domain locally on your machine. Great if you have a couple of node apps that you want to have running whenever you start your machine, and they aren’t necessarily ready to setup launchd scripts for etc. Or you can use this as an alternative I suppose. I haven’t used this yet, but if it does was it claims to do, it could be a nice time saver.