test

I just put this script in cron to check how fast a site I'm hosting is responding every 15 minutes. If the response time comes back too slow, it emails me.

Just in case anybody out there was looking for something like this.

output="path/to/tmp/file"
url="url.to.monitor.com"
download="downloaded_file_to_delete.html"

#number of seconds to respond
gap=15

rm -f $output
rm -f $download

first=`date +"%T"`
start_min=${first:3:2}
start_sec=${first:6:2}

wget -a $output -nv $url
next=`cat $output`
end_min=${next:3:2}
end_sec=${next:6:2}

alert="no"
sec_dif=$((end_sec-start_sec))
min_dif=$[end_min-start_min]

if [ "$min_dif" -ne "0" ]
then
alert="yes"
else
if [ $sec_dif -gt $gap ] ; then
alert="yes"
fi
fi

if [ $alert == "yes" ]
then
mail -s "$url is taking $sec_dif seconds to respond" "your@email.com" < $output
fi

Seth Godin has another excellent post up about how advertisers and content providers tend to work together to deliver the opposite of what consumers want, in terms of advertising.

That online communities should operate more like conferences and less like publications is a difficult lesson to learn when it is so much easier to simply stick some banner ads in people's way and charge advertisers on a basic CPM.

Copyblogger makes a great observation about how newer social networking phenomena are becoming differentiated from old-timey blogging. It reminds me of when I was Director of Internet Services at Capital Newspapers and we first started getting requests from the newsrooms to add blogs and forums to madison.com (around 2001). From a programmer perspective, blogs and forums didn't really look any different than an article. But it soon became clear how much importance people place on the exact terminology used to describe "publishing some words on the web".

This is the first post of my shiny new blog. I hope to post links and commentary here on web development and publishing daily. --Todd