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-
