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Mr. Uptime
By Michael Lundberg | August 11, 2007
I happened to come across this little utility while reading one of my favorite Web 2.0 websites, Mashable.com (http://www.mashable.com). Mr. Uptime is one of about a billion available FireFox plugins. So far, I’ve found it to be very useful.
One of the many new Web 2.0 websites that I’ve been interested in lately is Dopplr (http://www.dopplr.com), which is a social networking site for frequent travelers. Unfortunately, Dopplr seems to be down… alot. Like all. The. Time. So when I read this Mashable article (http://mashable.com/2007/08/10/mr-uptime/), and discovered Mr. Uptime, I thought to myself, “now that would be a useful little tool to tell me when Dopplr was actually up.”
In a nutshell, Mr. Uptime is a tool used to notify you when a website returns to normal and starts servicing requests. The installation is simple and straightforward (as all Firefox plugins seem to be) and now I have another new icon next to my address field in my toolbar. In order to begin using it, you add websites to a “watchlist.” You can tag several sites for watching, and you can set two different types of “watches.” The first type of watch will let you know when a website changes from an error code to OK (or http status code 200). This is probably the most common usage of this tool. The second type of watch will let you know when any text, which is set by the user, changes on a website. You could use this second type of watch to tell you when the Apple Store goes live again after a Steve Jobs presentation. The Apple Store typically stops servicing customers just before all major Steve Jobs keynote speeches. While it’s down, the storefront is replaced with the infamous “We’ll be back soon!” note. Mr. Uptime would let you know as soon as that text changes back to the regular storefront.
Some of the Mr. Uptime’s features include:
- It checks every 5 minutes for the first 60 minutes. Then every 10 minutes for the next 120 minutes after that. Every 15 minutes for the next 180 minutes after that. Every 30 minutes for the next 240 minutes. And every 60 minutes after that.
- It’s easy to add websites to a watch list using the Mr. Uptime icon, which gets installed in any one of three places on your Firefox browser - your main toolbar, the bottom status bar, or the top right hand corner.
- Because everything runs inside your Firefox session, your watch lists aren’t uploaded anywhere, which is nice for the security conscious folks out there.
- When a watched site goes live, Mr. Uptime automatically pulls the site up, under a new tab.
Mr. Uptime is a free download and is available at: http://mruptime.pingdom.com Give it a try and tell me what you think!
Topics: Web 2.0 |
August 15th, 2007 at 6:53 am
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