http://www.wormly.com/blog Musings from the creator of Wormly, "The Best Website Uptime Monitoring Service". Fact. Tue, 26 Aug 2008 02:27:29 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's been of some concern here at Wormly HQ that loads of great new features are going unnoticed by you all - and our lack of a coherent announcement strategy was certainly to blame for this. So starting today, you will be able to stay abreast of all new Wormly features ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2008/08/26/new-features-announcements-dont-miss-out/ I'm pleased to report we've rolled out another much-requested feature - the time-stamping of all alert messages. Times are expressed in the timezone you've specified - the globally set zone or a host specific-one if available. They're shown in short form for the SMS & Short Email channels, e.g: 26/Aug 11:15 And long form ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2008/08/26/date-and-time-now-shown-in-alert-message-bodies/ Courtesy of the Google AdWords Help Center: "Even if you have a high quality ad, if advertisers below you are not bidding very much, your actual CPC may not be high enough to qualify your ad to appear in a top position. With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/08/21/adwords-google-continues-to-take-out-the-trash/ Skype, an essential communication tools for millions of individuals and businesses worldwide has been unable to authenticate users during the past 14 hours, rendering the service unusable. 14 hours - and counting. One can scarcely imagine the magnitude of the technical failure that causes such a lengthy outage. Although Skype offers paid-for, ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/08/17/the-big-guys-fall-hardest-skype-outage/ Don't be shy - your customers really want to know just how reliable your service is. So go ahead and brag about it with our Public Uptime Reports. When enabled, you can place one of our funky uptime badges on your site showing uptime from the previous 24 hour, 7, ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/08/01/got-great-uptime-tell-the-world/ Rip-offs have never gone out of fashion - and it seems that web services are no exception. Possibly of interest to budding software engineers - examine this brief from one of our fans: Rent A Coder - Clone of Wormly "I need a site to be programmed exactly similar ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/07/03/build-your-own-wormly-uptime-monitoring-service/ Most sysadmins share a slightly compulsive tendency to need proof that things are working properly. This is particularly evident if said sysadmin is setting up a corporate mail server - it has to work first time, no excuses. One of the more painful parts of that process has been testing ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/05/22/setting-up-an-smtp-server-save-30-seconds/ Last week I had a chat with Mitch over at The Web Hosting Show, where we discussed - among other things - why I'm so obsessed with uptime. It was therapeutic, particularly knowing that his listeners number many in the hosting industry. Improved uptime and performance is what ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/05/08/interview-the-web-hosting-show/ This week my home network witnessed the passing of an era. For over 10 years now, I've been running a variety of Linux -based servers at home mainly as development boxes, with a bit of personal web and mail hosting on the side. It made a lot of ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/05/04/the-silence-of-virtualization/ You might be surprised at just how variable the HTTP response times are in your web application. Take a look at this 24-hour example: Crucially, the variance in this example is caused by the application response time, rather than the network. That’s the blue Exec component, not TCP or ... http://www.wormly.com/blog/2007/04/23/variance-don%e2%80%99t-let-it-kill-your-ajax-app/