JamesX

Time to report in on another useful site for all you budding webmasters out there. This one came from Richie but I like it, so I’m blogging about it! It’s Montastic and basically it will monitor the server that your website is hosted on and let you know when it’s down. It’s pretty simple and has three features:

• It will email you when the site is down
• It will email you when the site comes back up - ingenious, I don’t know where they come up with this stuff!
• It gives you an RSS feed of the status and a *cough* handy Yahoo! widget

But best of all it’s FREE! I haven’t quite worked out the design logic behind the green page yet, but it is definitely suitably named…

Well it seems that my blog is invincible. While Dreamhost is suffering from a severe DoS attack, this site is still running. It’s kinda odd really considering that the rest of my sites are down, but hey, I’m not complaining!

While we’re talking about the site, I thought I’d mention that I’ve set myself a new goal of getting into the Technorati top 100,000. How am I going to achieve this? Well that’s where you come in. If you’ve got a blog, link to me! (While you’re there, you should check Technorati yourself to see if you’re blog is listed and claim it!) If you don’t have your own site, you can add me to your Technorati favourites by clicking here. Don’t ask me why I’m bothering with all this, it’s just something that came to me the other day and it seems achievable. Plus if everyone links up, we’ll be a much happier bloggy community wont we?

You know pretty much everyone is on the internet nowadays - you are reading this page after all! But it’s grown into such a huge mass of useless information that just finding the people out there that you know from the millions of others is quite a daunting task. But there are a few ways and one by one people seem to twist me into signing up for all these sites so to promote healthier networking, I’m going to shamelessly plug them all here in the hope that those who aren’t members can sign up and find me!

Of course everyone knows the old timers like schoolfriends.com.au, after all, it’s been around for years. And most people have heard of, or are likely members of, MySpace.com. But I bet most of you haven’t used Facebook.com before. The underlying principle behind all these sites is to be able to find your friends and network with them so that as they move on in their lives, you can keep track of them. A novel concept, and one I didn’t really believe in until recently when I managed to discover people I haven’t seen since school and have now arranged to catch up with. The possibilities are really quite astounding.

Of course you have to get over the “my personal information is out there on the web” phobia, but really most sites take this into account nowadays. After all, the Internet only knows what you give it (unless of course you spider every known document on every known media on the planet aka Google).

So get out there and find your long lost friends!