Tools « GotChance

5 Ways to monitor your Site’s Status

August 2nd, 2007 10 Comments »

Its really impossible for anyone to sit in front of the Computer 24 hours and monitor if your website is UP or DOWN. But this is really essential for everyone. There are some nice services available which can monitor your site’s status 24 x 7.

Montastic

Montastic is the first thing that i would recommend when it comes to Website Status Monitoring. Its completely free. It is really “The free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck”. I have been using them for few days now and really nice. I like their RSS feature and the “No unreasonable limit on the number of websites monitored”.

SiteUptime

SiteUptime is the next best one out there. They have three different plans : Free, Premium and Advanced. The free plan is too basic with just one monitor and 30/60 minute checks.

Free Web Monitoring

Free Web Monitoring is the first service that i used and i continue to use it even today. They have 60 minute checking time too, but, they allow multiple sites in a single account.

upPanel

upPanel was the second service that i started using. They have 3 plans too. I had the Free plan which had 30 minute lowest interval. Their Basic and Pro accounts have very nice features like AIM Alerts, SMS Alerts, Skype Alerts and Phone Alerts.

FreeSiteStatus

I read about this service over here. The features are not very clear. I think, signing up is free. But, you have to pay to start monitoring websites. The pricing depends on the number of URLs to be monitored, the time interval etc.. which can be calculated from here. This isn’t something i would recommend.

So, i suggest that you take a look at the above services and get the most out these by signing up for multiple ones. I suggest signing up for Montastic, upPanel and Free Web Monitoring.

Safari doesn’t obey Windows’ Shortcuts ?

July 28th, 2007 No Comments »

Today i found something really weird. I was making a small change to this theme (actually made Pings and Comments separate) and wanted to test out in all the browsers. So i opened up my Firefox, Internet Explorer 7, Opera and the recently launched Safari for Windows. After checking everything in all the browsers, i presses Winkey + M, which is meant to be a “Minimize All” command. But, the Safari windows was still maximized. All others went down to the taskbar. I tried few more times. The same happened. I am one dumb man when it comes to System bugs, so, i thought “Might be due to the fact that Safari looks different from other Windows ?”. What a crazy doubt. Anyway, to clear this up,i opened my Pownce Adobe Air application. It obeyed it very much.

So, might this be a consequence of the never-ending MS-Apple war ? Who is to be accused for this ? Lol.

Feedrinse – Read what matters you

July 27th, 2007 1 Comment »

A day ago, i wrote about AideRSS, a way to manage your feeds, if you are subscribed to too many of them. I also mentioned about FeedRinse, an alternate way to filter your feeds. The key different between AideRSS and FeedRinse is that AideRSS allows you to “read what matters”, while FeedRinse allows you to read what matters YOU. That is, AideRSS automatically fetches the best posts/good posts and provides them to you. But, with FeedRinse, you can supply the necessary conditions for a entry to appear on a feed. Take a look at the picture below :

That is self explanatory. Right ? The options are that you can either Block the post or Allow the post after setting conditions. And there are other options available too. Check out special screenshot made by me :

FeedRinse gives you better control over what you read. That is why i would prefer FeedRinse over AideRSS. I’m not against AideRSS. It does good what it aims to do. Just that my personal preference would be for FeedRinse.I think i needn’t explain how FeedRinse works because their Tour page explains it very well. That page is the best of its kind that i have ever seen. Too see FeedRinse in action, check out the below image :

Those were the conditions that i set up on my own feed and the output feed is here.

Subcribed to too many Feeds ?

July 25th, 2007 1 Comment »

With the rate at which the Blogosphere is growing, there are hundreds of thousands of blogs created daily. They include some great ones too, which tempt us to subscribe to its Feed. Gradually the list of blogs in one’s RSS Reader grows into 10s and 50s and even some 100s. I, personally use Netvibes as my feed reader, and i am subscribed to around 40 feeds. So, it gives me around 100 new entries daily and its really impossible for me to read all of them. Thats where services like AideRSS come in handy. AideRSS is an intelligent assistant that saves time and keeps you on top of the latest news. We research every story and filter out the noise, allowing you to focus on what matters most.

So, what does AideRSS do ?

AideRSS uses a unique scoring system called PostRankâ„¢ (ranging from 0 to 10) to categorize posts from a certain blogs into Best posts, Great Posts and Good posts. It takes into account the number of comments, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links, Bloglines conversations, Diggs and Icerocket conversations and compares them with other posts from the same blog and assigns the relative score called PostRankâ„¢.

Your post need not have thousands of links and Diggs to have a PostRankâ„¢ of 10. It is relative. If a post on your blog receives 5 comments on an average and if a particular post receives 15, it ranks higher. It doesn’t matter even if 100s of comments are made on blogs like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb etc… So every blog has its own best posts. Thats very logical.

On a whole it is a very useful service and i’m sure i am going to use it and many will too. You can go here to subscribe to filtered feeds from GotChance. Kudos to Ilya Grigorik for creating such a wonderful service. There are also Screencasts available.

There is also another service available for Filtering feeds called FeedRinse. AideRSS allows you to read what is good and what everyone likes. FeedRinse is completely different from AideRSS. It lets you choose what you want to read. I’ll write about it in my next post.

Foldspy – Optimize your ad placements

July 23rd, 2007 2 Comments »

FoldSpy is a simple service that allows you to optimize ad placements on your websites. It is more of a remotely hosted Javascript than a service. “Fold” is the part of the website that is visible without needing to scroll down. Because of different screen resolutions, browsers, user preferences and operating system, the fold is not the same for all the users. To maximize revenue from your ads, you want them to be visible to the majority of your visitors without scrolling: â€œabove the foldâ€. FoldSpy finds the fold.

The screenshot shows the same website (CNN), but the folds are different due to the factors mentioned above.

Installing FoldSpy is very simple. It just involves one line of code. Though the site shows a demo video, it doesn’t provide a live demo. So here, i have added it to GotChance so that you guys can test drive it. Here : GotChance.com/#foldspy.

The basic service is free for everyone. However, they have an optional PRO account option for $6/year. I didn’t try it, but here is what they say.

Foldspy Pro has everything in Free but also records stats from your site, giving you data on the unique profile of your visitors.

I had actually planned to write a post on Choosing best Ad placements. But, i completely forgot about it. Now, you can expect in a day or two.