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IndexNow Update Script - automate your search engine URL submissions
“IndexNow” is an automatic way to get participating search engines to come search specified URLs your site, and one cool thing about it is if you submit an URL to one, it gets pushed to all. I wanted an easy and automatic way to submit if there are any new URLs on this blog, so I started thinking of a way it could be done. Let me share that with you.
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M365 Trial Tenant Trouble
We at my firm eSolia decided to migrate everything to Microsoft M365, for better or worse, because literally all our clients use it and things are just more efficient if it’s our daily driver. However, we had used a production domain in a trial tenant in the past, and this caused a lot of agita.
Besides the tenantname.onmicrosoft.com domain that comes with the service, you can assign a custom domain that you purchase via a registrar in the usual way.
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Linux Tools for Learners
If you’re trying to learn *nix command line, whether you’re on a Mac, Linux, the Linux subsystem in Windows or something else, here’s a few pointers and tips that you might find useful:
In my opinion, don’t try to learn every command deeply, but rather learn the basics, take a while to get used to it, then circle back for more detail. Use man to learn what you need, when you need it.
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Hugo Vercel Deploy
A question on the Hugo support forum prompted me to try deploying the Hugo quickstart site with Ananke Theme, on Vercel. It was super simple and took only 10 min. Here’s what I did.
Hugo Quickstart First, just run through the quickstart steps in a local folder to get it basically working. I put my projects in $HOME/dev.
Connect to Vercel using their CLI command Assuming you have installed the vercel CLI command locally and have authenticated, you can connect your new Hugo project to your Vercel account by running vercel in the project folder.
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Postmarkapp Template Backup
The other day I wrote about using Postmark for sending out HTML emails. We wanted to have a way to backup our Postmark email templates automatically, so we coded a simple Github Actions workflow which is available on our Github.
There is about 10 minutes of setup for you to do, and it works well enough to backup your Postmark templates and server information on a schedule.
Basically, you need to:
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App Email Services
If you are hosting your app on a service like the recently-closed Webfaction, you might be getting shared space for your web pages or app, databases and email addresses that can be used for sending or receiving. However, many modern hosting environments such as Vercel , Netlify or others, don’t come with email capability and assume you’ll setup some service to handle the emails that are issued from your app, such as welcome messages, password resets and the like, or, inbound emails.
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Apple Mail Privacy
After updating to Apple’s iOS 15, amongst several privacy initiatives in iCloud+, you can enable “MPP” or Mail Privacy Protection, that has email marketers scrambling, up in arms because it blocks those 1px “beacon” images used to track your opens. It’s so easy to turn on.
Here’s where to look:
Settings, Mail, Privacy Protection, Protect Mail Activity ON
What it does it pre-fetch your email contents to a proxy, blocking the trackers email marketers typically use.
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Universal CJK Typeface
Holy serif! Google and Adobe have released “Noto Serif CJK” aka “Source Han Serif”, part of an ambitious and important project to design a set of typefaces to cover the world’s languages.