Free Website Uptime Monitor: Uptime Robot: "

Uptime is a pretty important factor for the success of a website which directly effects the number of visitors, visitor loyalty, search engine positions & more.

Here is a lovely free service which is created by me & Daniel Rimille of SSLmatic to minimize downtime.

Uptime Robot is a totally free service which monitors your websites every 5 minutes & alerts you if they go down.

It allows you to monitor up to 50 websites & alerts can be received via e-mail or SMS (Twitter & RSS coming soon).

You can add multiple alert contacts to notify multiple users in case of a downtime.

It is possible to monitor both http & https addresses which is pretty important to check if the SSL certificate installed functions correctly.

The service has a simple & fully Ajaxed interface for a faster usage.

P.S. Uptime Robot will hopefully get mature within a short time. But during that period, if you're looking for a more professional service, you may want to check paid ones like Pingdom, SiteUptime, AreMySitesUp…

Upcoming features

• RSS & Twitter alerts


• keyword checking in websites monitored (testing)


• mobile version


• monitoring from multiple locations (we may need your help, will be sharing more details later)

Follow at Twitter for updates, support..

We'll be updating you via @uptimerobot Twitter user for new features, improvements, etc. Also, feel free to contact us from there for support, feature requests, etc.

A little story of Uptime Robot:

I'm sharing a little office with Daniel Rimille of SSLmatic which we're building a complicated web application for a while.

The application is something totally different from Uptime Robot but it needed to monitor websites/IPs it worked with & we created a module for this which worked awesome.

It was my idea to convert this module into a website uptime monitoring service.

Daniel was a little uncommitted as he thought this would take much time & we would be missing our schedule for the application we're building. I thought this was an opportunity to see how it would scale, help us improve ourselves in means of usability, handling support requests, etc.

And I claimed to build it in only 2 days, had a bet (lost a dinner), but completed in 4 days. It took 8 extra days for us both to polish it & here it is.

We loved what we created & will be updating/improving Uptime Robot frequently as there are so many similarities with what we're already building.

Google Maps Envelope: "

Google Maps may be nothing new, but using the maps for something other than directions is. The example above was created by graphic designer Beste Miray Dogan, who 'showed that with a Google Map print out and a little ingenuity, you can make a custom envelop that pinpoints the exact location from which it was sent.'

There's no template on her site, but with some trial and error I trust you'll be able to master the mapenvelope in no time.

PDFMyURL Saves Web Sites as PDF Files [PDF]: "

Saving something as a PDF file is a great way to preserve it for future reference or for sharing with others, without risking the site changing before you look at it again. PDFMyURL makes it easy to convert sites to PDF.

Point PDFMyURL at a website URL and it will convert the site into a PDF document. Not only can you do a simple conversion just by plugging in a URL but you can also modify the PDF with a wide variety of flags—see the advanced menu for a full list—that let you set the page orientation and size, header information, print orientation, and more. PDFMyURL also has a bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar for easy access to the PDF creation service.

PDFMyURL is a free service and doesn't watermark or otherwise alter the site you are converting to PDF. Have a favorite tool for PDF conversion or a bookmarklet that makes life easier? Let's hear about it in the comments.

PDFMyURL

Dummy Image Generator Is the Lorem Ipsum of Images [Design]

Dummy Image Generator Is the Lorem Ipsum of Images [Design]: "

Lorem ipsum is a block of dummy text in Latin often used in design and publishing to fill space in a mockup. The brilliant Dummy Image Generator is like 'lorem ipsum' for images.

Like 'lorem ipsum', the Dynamic Dummy Image Generator offers a glimpse at what content might look like in a layout, but instead of placeholder text, it creates a placeholder image. Using the service is dead simple:

Sometimes you just need a placeholder image right at your finger tips. Just enter the width + x + height at the end of this URL and off you go!

Example: http://dummyimage.com/640x480

You can even use a dummy image as a source in your HTML, like <img src="http://dummyimage.com/340x123" alt="A Dummy Image">, which would look like this:

The Dynamic Dummy Image Generator is free to use, and is a bit on the geeky side, but if you're a designer or just spend the occasional free minute tinkering on the web, it's a really simple, well-executed idea.

Dynamic Dummy Image Generator

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Google Map Buddy Generates High Resolution, Full Size Area Maps [Downloads]

Google Map Buddy Generates High Resolution, Full Size Area Maps [Downloads]: "

Want a wall-sized satellite view of your neighborhood? A full-page street map of the town you're visiting? Google Map Buddy, a free, portable map maker, grabs data from Google Maps and arranges it exactly how you want it.

When you un-zip and run Google Map Buddy, it asks you to choose your Google Map nationality, then opens a browser to let you search out the location you're looking at. Once you get there, hit 'Select area,' then draw a rectangle around the area you want to capture. After fine-tuning the zoom level and hitting 'Create Map Image,' Map Buddy goes to work grabbing, tile by tile, your area's map. It generates a generally high-resolution PNG of your area, and provides the individual map tiles to keep and arrange yourself into a larger grid, if you'd like.

The software itself can be described as "picky"—you have to "X" out any particular business or destination that pops up in a dialog box on the map, and after zooming in on the Google Map browser to your destination, Map Buddy asks you for a deeper zoom level than what you've already set. So it's not an elegant tool, exactly, but it does deliver the very printable, full-picture map of your destination.

Map Buddy is a free download for Windows systems only, and doesn't require installation.

The Google Map Buddy [Augmented Reality Software via The Red Ferret Journal]

Drawter – Create CSS Web Template by Just Drag Your Mouse

Drawter – Create CSS Web Template by Just Drag Your Mouse: "

I just found this tool and really like it, this tool is for generate CSS web template online. You just simply draw a box on the canvas, then click on the menu Code –> generate code and you get the code.

Drawter is a tool written in JavaScript and based on jQuery library. It provides you the possibility to literally draw your website’s code. It runs on every single web-browser which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn.

This tool also gives you options to adjust language, page title, font, color, backgroud, border, box style and more.

Currently Drawter is available in Pro version, which means that it is intended for webmasters use only – knowledge of HTML and CSS is required.

Link : drawter.com

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