July 6, 2008, 2:58 p.m.
What's Up? — An XMPP-based Web Monitor
I finally got around to building a useful web monitor or myself. I bring up little web services all over the place and generally do a bad job of ensuring they start correctly and/or continue to run correctly. I don't want to get paged when these things are broken, or have my email box flooded or anything, so XMPP seemed to be the right thing for me.
So yesterday I started writing the monitor for me. I called it what's up because I'm not very creative. You can try it out by sending an IM to whatsup@jabber.org. It can do a single get (a la down for everyone or just me) over IM, or it can periodically do requests and validations for you on a collection of URLs.