NodePing vs. Pingdom — server monitoring

Pingdom:

Positives:

mobile app
large number of testing locations
10 checks at the yearly price is reasonably priced.
Built-in “PageDuty”-lite incident response is handy, though overkill for personal web servers.
I like the root cause analysis any time a check fails. Provides full connection output, response headers, etc. Extremely helpful when troubleshooting the cause of the failed check.

Negatives:

New website design is painfully slow and confusing.
Can’t add a new check via the mobile app
No option to specify host headers for a check — such as specify IP and specify the hostname directly.
No public status page unless you pay 2x per month.

NodePing:

Positives:

Free public status page
Website is fast and clean, though lacking some features
Pricing is attractive, even without a yearly agreement.

Negatives:

No mobile app
Relatively few testing locations
No option to specify host headers for a check — such as specify IP and specify the hostname directly.
Virtually nothing in the way of detail when a check fails. Also no easy way to go back and find a failed check after 300 successful checks have passed.

They both have a variety of checks — HTTP/HTTPS, UDP/TCP arbitrary port check, POP/SMTP/IMAP, and DNS checks. Both send me an email and push notification via Pushover whenever there’s an issue. Both use 1 minute checks, and confirmation from 3 locations before an alert is triggered.

I like StatusCake, but their checks seem spotty at best. They report all kinds of intermittent downtime when every other monitoring service sees zero issues. Not exactly great when your server monitoring tool is lying to you.

I also tested Monitus and CopperEgg. Didn’t like either one. I use New Relic’s free plan which is handy, also Linode’s Longview tool with the free plan.

Ultimately it looks like I’ll be going with Pingdom, even though it’s not my favourite choice.

Interesting Links 5.30.08

TimesMachine – New York Times – TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through The New York Times of December 30, 1922.
SuperLame! Comic Word Balloon Engine – Simply add speech bubbles to photos you upload. Useless? Sure, but fun.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 4: User Interface – CSS3 brings some great new properties relating to resizing elements, cursors, outlining, box layout and more.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 5: Multiple Columns – CSS3 introduces a new module known, appropriately, as multi-column layout. It allows you to specify how many columns text should be split down into and how they should appear.
Design Critique: Blog Platforms – Most designers are familiar with the relative pros and cons of different publishing tools â€“ but what about the websites of the blog platforms themselves?
TinySong – type a song, get a link, share the full song with your friends. It’s really that simple. Works great for those “have you heard this song?” moments.
Adobe Labs – Adobe has released the first betas for Dreamweaver CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Soundbooth CS4. Note: betas only work for 2 days unless you have an existing CS3 serial number.
Fixing Twitter – I am getting sick of talk about twitter and itâ€™s scalability problems and also frankly unqualified people slagging the service for itâ€™s unreliability and also coming up with stupid ignorant answers to how it should be fixed.
Read at Work – it looks like you’re being productive, but you’re definitely not. Kind of funny, but I can’t imagine actually using it.

Interesting Links 5.16.08

picasa2flickr – A simple “plugin” that allows Picasa users to upload their photos to Flickr.
Pimp my Outlook Today – I’m a big fan of TiddlyWiki so it seemed an ideal candidate for integration with the Outlook Today screen.
CSS Attribute Selectors: Built-In Classes – Classes and IDs arenâ€™t the only ways you can describe the elements in your website in order to style them. You can also make use of attribute selectors.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 1: What is it? – This first tutorial will give you a very basic introduction to the new possibilities created by the standard.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 2: Borders – CSS3 takes borders to a new level with the ability to use gradients, rounded corners, shadows and border images.
Introduction to CSS3 – Part 3: Text Effects – CSS is already reasonably versatile in the way in which text can be displayed, but still constricts design in quite a few areas. CSS3 goes some way towards removing those limitations.
15 Great Examples of Web Typography – It may be that not all the sites listed here are to your taste, but itâ€™s hoped that something will inspire you.
Web Based Workflow: Tale of the $0 Studio – In the past few years weâ€™ve seen an explosion of free, web and open source alternatives to popular, often expensive, design programs. With this workflow itâ€™s all pure profit!
10 Things I Learned from Mental Detox Week – Getting rid of technology (or most of it) for one week.
5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed – A number of psychological experiments over the years have yielded terrifying conclusions about the subjects.
Ad*Access – The Ad*Access Project presents images and information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.

Review: The Hobbit (or there and back again)

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
ISBN: 0618260307
This book is available on Amazon
The Hobbit is a prequel to the infamous The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This won’t be your naive run-of-the-mill “this book rocks!!” type of reviews. To be quite honest, I found this novel to be rather bland and uninspired. It felt quite drab and lacking any kind of compelling plot when compared to the action packed extravaganza that the LOTR’s trilogy provided. It’s tough for me to recommend this famous book to anyone considering I so thoroughly loathed reading this, but perhaps if the potential victim hadn’t already been spoiled by the wonderful journey that is the LOTR trilogy then they might find it exciting.
[xrr rating=3/5]

A New Chapter: Things to do this Summer

I thought I’d briefly update what I plan to accomplish this summer. The semester is finally finally done and over with (see my recent post regarding the ridiculous amount of things I needed to finish in the past 3 weeks).

Reinstall Windows Home Server (WHS). Never mind, not going to reinstall.
Read â€œHead First SQLâ€.
Read â€œA History of Godâ€. Never mind, this looks to be quite boring.
Read â€œThe Hobbit or There and Back Againâ€. DONE
Have some type of relaxing vacation.
Decide if I will keep my web hosting.
Reinstall XP on my desktop because Vista sucks (even with SP1).
Rewrite my current blog theme from scratch (itâ€™s using tables right nowâ€¦ick!). Never mind, not applicable any more.
Update my laptop to Vista SP1 (why not reinstall XP? donâ€™t ask). DONE
Work related: apparently I’m going to be learning Visual Basic this summer. We’ll see.
Work related: I also may be learning Ruby on Rails (jRails specifically). We’ll see.

Interesting Links 4.4.08

An interesting collections of links, primarily aimed at CSS this time. I can’t wait for this semester to be over with so I can get back to some web design. I am so behind in terms of things I want/need to read at this point.

Interesting Links 3.7.08

I apologize, but I am far too lazy to write a blurb about each one of those links. I’ll just leave it at this: IE8 Beta 1 is a step in the right direction, TeamViewer kicks ass for remote computer support, and the 6 animals that can destroy you is hilarious to read.

Redux: Things to do when this semester is finally over

My list of “things to do once the semester is over” keeps growing in length so I thought I’d just I’d add them on:

Reinstall XP on my desktop because Vista sucks (even with SP1).
Rewrite my current blog theme from scratch (it’s using tables right now…ick!).
Update my laptop to Vista SP1 (why not reinstall XP? don’t ask).