It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since my first day at OrcsWeb. Today is my last official day, but I’ll still be close by. I have a number of ties here, including being a customer through Vaasnet.
So much has changed in this time. Ten years ago I began working for OrcsWeb from Canada. Nine years ago I moved my family down here to North Carolina and assumed the role of Director of Technology. I was able to be a part of the company as it grew in staff, servers, customers, and reputation. I feel honored to be a part of OrcsWeb during these exciting years.
During my time at OrcsWeb I have been given opportunities to attend conferences, meet and become friends with top technical experts in the field, write articles, co-author two books, and speak at conferences and code camps. It was through OrcsWeb that I was given opportunities to be active in the community, to become a Microsoft MVP and an ASPInsider.
I’m grateful to Brad and Karla Kingsley who have always treated me like more than an employee. They have always encouraged me to grow and to pursue my dreams.
I’m thankful to Jeff Graves who has been accommodating to my evolving schedule and less than full time availability. And in terms of technical smarts, Jeff tops the list! And I’m also thankful of the rest of the team at OrcsWeb who are experts in the field, and with whom it’s always been a privilege to work.
Moving forward, I have two main focuses. I’ll be able to spend more time on Vaasnet (a company I co-founded with Jeff Widmer) to see the company position itself further in the market and to strengthen both the product and the brand. Additionally, I’m working in a part time basis with Dynamicweb an established CMS and eCommerce company in Europe who is just moving into the US market. Dynamicweb has a strong product already and I’m excited to work with the leadership team in the US. Expect to see more of Dynamicweb in the coming months and years.
I just want to reiterate a big thanks to OrcsWeb for helping write such an important chapter in my life. And it’s with excitement that I look forward to the next chapter of my life.
Save this URL, memorize it, write it on a sticky note, tweet it, tell your colleagues about it!
localtest.me (http://localtest.me)
and
*.localtest.me (http://something.localtest.me)
If you do any testing on your local system you’ve probably created hosts file entries (c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) for different testing domains and had them point back to 127.0.0.1. This works great but it requires just a bit of extra effort.
This localtest.me trick is so obvious, so simple, and yet so powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other domain names like this out there, but I haven’t run across them yet so I just ordered the domain name localtest.me which I’ll keep available for the internet community to use.
Here’s how it works. The entire domain name localtest.me—and all wildcard entries—point to 127.0.0.1. So without any changes to your host file you can immediate start testing with a local URL.
Examples:
http://localtest.me
http://newyork.localtest.me
http://mysite.localtest.me
http://redirecttest.localtest.me
http://sub1.sub2.sub3.localtest.me
You name it, just use any *.localtest.me URL that you dream up and it will work for testing on your local system.
This was inspired by a trick that Imar Spaanjaars introduced me to. He created a loopback wildcard URL with his company domain name. I took this one step further and ordered a domain name just for this purpose.
I would have liked to order localhost.com or localhost.me but those domain names were taken. So to help you remember, just remember that it’s ‘localtest’ and not ‘localhost’, and it’s ‘.me’ rather than ‘.com’.
I can’t track usage since the domain name resolves to 127.0.0.1 and never passes through my servers, so this is just a public tool which I’ll give to the community. I hope it gets used. And, since I can’t really use the domain name to explain itself, please spread the word and tell others about it.
Some examples on how to use it would include:
- Creating websites on your dev machine. site1.localtest.me, site2.localtest.me, site3.localtest.me.
- Great for URL Rewrite (IIS) or mod_rewrite (Apache) testing: redirect.localtest.me, failuretest.localtest.me, subdomain.localtest.me, city1.localtest.me.
- Any testing on your local system where a friendly URL would be useful.
I hope you enjoy!