Website monitoring (or uptime monitoring) is essential for any commercial website or service and there are plenty of commercial vendors that provide these services. With the recent rollout of GitHub Actions, I’ve put together a simple lightweight website monitor you can implement for free, perfect for side projects and personal websites. In addition to this WordPress blog I’m using it to watch my parked domains and Tweetfave project, making sure they are alive and well.
About 5 years ago I migrated this blog to WordPress. Overall, it’s been working well but my manual method for keeping WordPress (and plugins/themes) updated has been less than ideal. I just implemented a new system with GitHub and Docker that will hopefully make that upgrade path smoother, help me keep things updated, and avoid security issues from out of date code.
Updated 2024-07-07 For domain names I’ve reserved but haven’t done anything with yet, I like to have them parked with my own simple landing page rather than one of those ad-filled “parked domain” pages hosted by the registrar. Previously I had set mine up on a Digital Ocean VM. This wasn’t too difficult (and had a side benefit of forcing me to brush up on my Apache HTTP Server skills) but I’ve switched to a much easier method: hosting for free via GitHub Pages. This is not only free in terms of cost, but also time because it’s very simple…
Someone wrote in to let me know that an older project of mine which provides a simple webservice echo test was referencing some out of date projects. My HTTP test service doesn’t use any of those other services, but I’ve updated the blog post description to point to some new options for comparison purposes. The original hosted version of RequestBin (at requestb.in) is no longer live. This was run by Runscope at the time and the source code is still up on GitHub (Runscope/requestbin). You can see their the status change: We have discontinued the publicly hosted version of RequestBin…
Tonight I spent a couple hours troubleshooting a problem with my Tweetfave service and handling of links. Luckily I discovered it was a simple matter of keeping up with Twitter’s API changes. This service has been running so smoothly and the API has actually been pretty stable. I needed to dust off my PHP skills and dig in to track down and adapt to an important change. Background Tweetfave is a free service which monitors the tweets you mark as favorites (now referred to as “likes”), then sends them to you by email. Currently the system stats show over 250…