No More Crying Wolf!

DavesWebWatchdog has been in beta about six months now. Other than a few very simple bugs and feature requests, by far the biggest issue to emerge from beta is what I would call false positives — a website seems to be down but is back up within a minute or two. It’s annoying to get these emails because there is no action that needs to be taken. Over time they even encourage you to ignore the warnings. I worked thru the code issues this weekend to correct this.

Basically what I did to the code was to introduce a delay between the time DavesWebWatchdog notices that a site is down and reports that information to the user. The delay is three minutes, so after initial detection, the site needs to stay down for three minutes before an email notification will be sent out.

We will see over the next couple of weeks how this approach works out, but hopefully this will solve the biggest technical problem we have faced.

Thanks to everyone who uses the site. Please help us out by spreading the word about DavesWebWatchdog.

 

-Dave-

Alternate EMail Address

A new feature was just put out this morning. If you log into your account, and click over to the Profile page, you will see that there is a new option called “Alternate EMail Address”. This option allows you to have alerts send to an email address other than the one you account is tied to. 

One user wanted this feature to help him manage the fact that he has MANY email addresses. He likes to subscribe to services from an an account that he doesn’t check all that often, but wants the DWW alerts going to the email on his Smart Phone. 

Another user wanted this feature so that his help desk guys would get the alerts. He wanted to set up the account, and manage which sites are being monitored, but he wanted whoever the was on duty (and therefore looking at the help desk email) to get alerts.