cleaning up the home-office, found a pad a paper with this logo on it.  Classic.

Diceroller.xyz updates

 been a while since last touched, but have made a few updates

• added some quick selects, based on games I'm playing: Pathfinder 2e Fireball and Lightning Bolt, and D&D 5e Advantage and Disadvantaged d20 roll.
• simplified the to-screen selection and output: one thing to select and it just shows both HTML and text box.
• internal stuff: removed NewtonSoft Json tools since .net core 5.0 has Json support natively now.

Trainblogging

Breakfast on the Auto Train. 

 Yeah, it's been forever.  But Diceroller.xyz is apparently getting some use, so starting to pay attention to it again.

minor changes:

• upgraded the framework from DotNetCore 2.1 to DotNet 5.0
• add a Roll Again button on the confirmation page to just run the roll over again

that's it.  enjoy.

It's alive!

http://www.diceroller.xyz

give it a roll.

DiceRoller - almost done

I've made a number of improvements in usability, and it now gets its random numbers from Random.org (falling back to the internal pseudo random generator if it cannot connect.)

Just need to put some text in the Credits and Technical Details pages and create a favicon, and I'll be ready to wire it to the real URL and see able getting it noticed by Google.

Still need to add a digital signature to authenticate rolls, but that can wait (since no one really uses it anyway, but still a good thing to have.)

feel free to play with the test install at https://dicerollerxyz.azurewebsites.net/

DiceRoller - something actually usable!

Got some time to continue work on the diceroller, working on the website so actual humans can use the system.  And while it's super simple so far, there's a usable page at https://dicerollerxyz.azurewebsites.net   give it a try.

Yeah, the URL has changed again.  I haven't had much time to work on the site for a little while, due to life.  When I first signed up to use Azure, I got 30 days to use a free $200 worth of cloud processing.  When it got close to the end of that free trial time, they encouraged me to sign up for the "pay-as-you-go" system.  Since the site is in development and what's running in Azure is just for testing, no real traffic, it shouldn't add up to anything significant.  So I was a little surprised when I loaded the Azure dashboard, and it told me I had incurred about $7 in charges, and projected $28 per month charge.  For no usage.

It seems that Azure charges a token fee for each app service, even with no traffic.  About 31 cents a day.  And with my micro-service model, I already had 3 sites running, and would like stand up 2 more and the actual website.  While it's just pocket change, it would add up.  But since it was charging per app service, there was an easy solution: combine them.  Ideally, with microservices, each site runs completely separately; but I didn't want to pay 6 times more just for architectural purity.  So I combined all the microservices and the website into a single app service.  Each microservice can still call each other as if they were hosted separately, it'll just happen to be the same base URL.  So sue me. :)