Howsthe.com? - Website Monitoring

This is a great video from google IO 2009:

Google chrome is a great and fast browser that has many cool features, bookmark syncing is one of them. This feature syncs your bookmarks to all your computers that use chrome. Also to Google's severs giving them the ability to promote your bookmark results within your Google searches using SearchWiki . This makes complete sense since if you bookmarked the page that you thought was important. This feature alone makes bookmarking useful again.

Here is an image of the results:

Here I have bookmarked djangos homepage in chrome, now when I search for django the first result is my bookmark.

When building an application it's hard not to depend on some outside resource, that you have no control over. When writing unit tests for this type of application it gets tricky, but thanks to mocking you are able to do so. Mocking comes in two forms, manual (a.k.a monkey patching) or using a mocking framework, we will be using the latter. A mocking framework creates objects that add expectations, define their methods, and return values for each method call in a simple way.

There are a few mocking frameworks available for python:

• pymox - http://code.google.com/p/pymox/
• pymock - http://theblobshop.com/pymock/
• mock - http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/index.html
• dingus - http://pypi.python.org/pypi/dingus/
• pmock - http://pmock.sourceforge.net/
• mocker - http://labix.org/mocker

Test driven development will help in a few aspects when developing an application. One aspect is you get to eat your own dog food even before you make it. You are able to use your API's before they are implemented, this will display any short comings in the design. Also by forcing yourself to think through a problem and get a better understanding, which in turn helps make better design decisions. We all make mistakes, without testing our code base there is no way to be sure that everything is still working, otherwise you are crossing your fingers and knocking on wood.

Django and Python Test Tools

If you've been using Django for some time you have heard the phrase "Django is just Python" and this holds true in the realm of testing your Django Application. You can use other testing frameworks with Django like nose. Django comes with a good testing framework that is built off the Python unittest module. The default Django testcase is a subclass of unittest.TestCase this class provides with some additional assertions and also a client that will helps you test your views ( more details to come ).

Many people ask us "why it's important to monitor your website for downtime". Here are few scenarios to explain why, and the reason we created this product.

These days many people own more then one website, if you run a business you probably run a business website, a business blog, and maybe even a personal blog. All of these websites bring in leads and help build the business brand. This makes it really important for these sites to be running, for any size business its important to get as many leads as possible to stay afloat.

Website monitoring is really important is for e-commerce sites. All e-commerce sites make their money by selling products or services through their website, well it makes it really hard to do this if the site is down. Being able to know of an issue almost instantly is a amazing benefit, because most issues can be resolved in a matter of minutes or less ( unless it's a hardware issue ). The longer the down time the more sales lost.

How many of you have launched a new website and then kept checking it every few minutes to make sure everything is running perfectly? In this scenario having a website monitoirng tool, would save you allot of time and worries, because if there are issues you will be notified by text message or email. Your website may be digged, slashdotted, or run in to an issue at any time and it's not humanly possible to manually check your website 365/24/7, for this reason you need a service like howsthe.com to monitor your websites for you.

If you have any stories of how website monitoring has helped you or other reason why you use a website monitoring service, please let us know in the comments.

Howsthe.com has made an architectural change in our deployment stack. We were using mod_wsgi and Apache to serve the static content, which was not working as well as planned. We moved to using nginx as a front end proxy and a static content server. It also acts as a gateway for the SSL connection so we don't have to run different mod_wsgi instances for HTTP connections and for HTTPS connections. Below we explain how we configured this setup.

Prerequisites:

We'll be using Ubuntu 9.04 server, the following packages need to be installed:

• apache2
• libapache2-mod-wsgi
• nginx
• subversion ( Only if you are going to install Django from SVN )

This doesn't include database installation, for this example we will not be using a database. If your application uses a database, install the correct python drivers and make sure your settings.py file is configured correctly.

Once these packages are installed, then install Django. We will not be going over this here due to expediency. You can find the directions at http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/install/.

Advertising is very expensive, studies have shown that it is not as effective as being on the first page of search results. These SEO tips will help you rank higher on the search engines results, and who doesn't like free referrals.

1. Content is King
   Search engines want something to index. If your website doesn't have much content the search engine will not rank you as higher authority for these keywords. Also it gives other websites the opportunity to link to you. For instance if you have a blog, this can generate many links to your website. These links will allow the page rank to flow, the more links to your website the sooner it will be indexed and more often.

2. SEO Friendly URLs
   URLs that use query parameters to get a website like http://www.howsthe.com/blog?id=100, have nothing in the URL that describes what the website is about. On the other hand a URL similar to http://www.howsthe.com/blog/12-seo-tips-for-beginners/ gives a brief description of the content on the page.
   It's important to optimize your website for keywords that match what your user base is searching for. Using URLs with less query parameters allows these keywords to be placed within the URL.

We recently updated our subscriptions to offer new users a 15 day free trial. This allows users to try our service with no upfront charge. During this trial period you will be using your full account not limited in any way. Your credit card or Paypal account will not be charged until your trial period has expired.

If the service is not right for you, you can cancel your account at any time. If you cancel your account before the trial period expires your credit card or Paypal account will not be charged.

Like always, feedback and suggestion are always welcome.

This weekend Howsthe.com got even better, we added many new features and would like to take this time to share them with you.

First and for most we now have four plans for you to choose from; Premium, Standard, Basic, and Free. The main differentiating factors in the plans is how many monitors and the interval rates. For more details on each of these plans visit this page (No sense in repeating that here).

Reports are another feature included in this release. It is now available to all users that are using one of the following plans; Premium, Standard, and Basic. There are three different reports which are explained below.

Average Load Time Report:

This report show the average load time of the website being monitored on a per day basis.

Uptime Report:

This report show the percentage uptime of the website being monitored on a per day basis.

Error Report:

This report show the number of errors that occurred on the website being monitored on a per day basis.

All the reports show more detailed information on hovering on the day points. We have many more ideas and suggestions on how to help you visualize this data, and we plan on adding more dynamic drill-downs on a day by day basis. Stay tuned for more details.

Has your friend ever asked you "does this site load for you"? Well now Howsthe.com Quick check feature will allow you to send a link to your friend so they can see the result of the check for them self.

We really hope you guys enjoy this releases and stay tuned for all the new features that are in the works. And like always contact us if you have any questions or suggestions.

Here at Howsthe.com it's very important for us to support as many different languages as possible. So we have upgraded our keyword search tool to support searching the content of any website, in any language. If you monitor a website that is in another language (Chinese, French, Ukrainian, etc...) now you may enter the word or phrase in that language. The keyword search tool does not separate the phrase on commas, instead the tool will search the entire content of the website while trying to located the entire string.

We really hope you enjoy this new feature, and like always please let us know what you think.