Web work

Monitor your WordPress site’s uptime with Jetpack Monitor

The latest version of Jetpack for WordPress plugin – which packs together several most used plugins and makes sure they all work nicely together – brings in a new one: Jetpack Monitor. Here is a straight forward description from the plugin site:

Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected.

Once activated, one of our servers will start checking your site every five minutes. If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off an email notification to the WordPress.com account that Jetpack is connected under.

I think this is brilliant. Every single WordPress site owner I know has at least once looked around for a simple monitoring service that would let him know when the site goes down. There are a few of those around, but all of them are a bit of a hassle to setup – you’ll need to know the terminology and at least have an idea about systems monitoring. With Jetpack Monitor all that is not needed anymore. Simply click the ‘Activate‘ button in the Jetpack settings and you are all done. Beautiful!

Reportr – Your life’s personal dashboard

Reportr is a complete application which works like a dashboard for tracking events in your life (using a very simple API). With a simple interface, it helps you track and display your online activity (with trackers for Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, …) or your real-life activity (with hardware trackers or applications like Runkeeper).

The project is entirely open source and you can host your own Reportr instance on your own server or Heroku.

Local copy of the Wikipedia

Slashdot tells that there is a way to have a local copy of Wikipedia on your computer:

Want your own copy of English Wikipedia with images? Got 100 GB of disk space? Then open-source app XOWA may be of interest to you. The project released torrents yesterday for the 2013-11-04 version of English Wikipedia. There’s 100 GB of sqlite databases containing 13.9 million pages, and 3.7 million images — readable from any Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X system.

It is, of course, a frozen in time version of Wikipedia – without any further updates or edits, but it might be quite handy for those places where Internet is not common or stable. Another use for this would be as a source of data for parsing tools or linguistic analysis, etc – working with local copy is much faster than fetching it page by page from the online.

Echo – lazy-loading HTML5 images with data-* attributes via JavaScript

Echo is quite handy for web developers. On those pages that feature a lot of images, things can get slow and the server might get too much of an abuse (with more traffic thrown at it). One way to work around this is to only load those images that are in the visible part of the screen. Here is a demo of how it works. Just keep scrolling down and notice how by default you have a blank.gif image shown, with a standard loading indicator and a split second later you see the actual image which was supposed to be in there.

Simple, easy, elegant – and that’s how I like it.

Social Fixer – improved Facebook experience

Enhance Facebook And Remove Annoyances!

Social Fixer for Facebook plugs into your browser and improves the existing Facebook.com web site. You get to pick which features you want to use:

Filter your news feed by keyword, author, and more
Tabbed news feed organizes posts by games, apps, etc
Hide parts of the page you don’t want to see
Don’t show posts you’ve already read
Auto-switch to the Most Recent news feed
Add some style with custom themes
And much more! See the List of Features.