Announcing SolarWinds Observability

Remember netbooks, those underpowered but very small and inexpensive laptops? If ever anything came and went in a whirlwind, that’s the example to we’d point to. Netbook sales are now a mere shadow of their former glory.

To some extent, netbooks were probably hampered by the wave of lightweight laptops that started appearing a couple of years ago. They weren’t quite as small, but small enough, and much more powerful. What they weren’t, however, was cheap. In that way they could not supersede the netbook.

HTTP response headers are usually pretty dry reading, but once in a blue moon you do stumble upon something that makes you smile. Here are some of our favorites.

Facebook is still growing and is getting close to enrolling that magic 1 billionth user. According to data we gathered from Socialbakers, Facebook has added 180 million new users in the past year. But where are those users coming from?

In this article we’ll look into just that. The population of Facebook is changing, growing in new places. For example, it turns out that in the past year, 30% of all new Facebook users have come from just two countries.

Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, population over 100,000, has a Facebook Page, currently with just over 1,300 likes. But that doesn’t make the city special with Facebook now close to 1 billion users.

But Broken Arrow is, in fact, very special because it appears to have taken the fascination for Facebook a step further than most other cities. How, you ask?

This is a post by guest blogger Wesley David. You can find more information about Wesley at the end of the article.

I have in two articles introduced you to SysRq and shared with you various ways it can be used. Now, in the last part of the series, I turn to troubleshooting SysRq with topics including what do you do if you don’t have a SysRq key, and limiting the capabilities of SysRq.

Automattic’s WordPress.com blog hosting platform just keeps growing. Traffic is up 25% compared to a year ago, and 79% compared to the year before that. It hosts around half of all WordPress sites in the world (of which there are currently 54.7 million)

It’s easy to forget how it started, as a small service by the people behind the open source WordPress blog software. Here is Matt Mullenweg’s short announcement from back in November of 2005, when WordPress.com was opened up for everyone:

Going back to the future would be nice, following in Marty McFly’s footsteps, but for now we’ll settle for just going back to the past. We have dug up 10 awesome vintage ads published in Byte Magazine from 1977 to 1984. It’s quite a mix of cool and quirky, funny and awesome.

When regular people post on Twitter, they normally use something like Twitter’s website or one of its official clients, or possibly a third-party Twitter client like Tweetbot or Echofon. Many large companies, however, have a more organized approach to social media and use special tools to manage their social presence.

According to the latest global web browser statistics, Safari accounts for 7.1% of desktop browsing traffic. That puts Safari in fourth place, after Chrome, IE, and Firefox.

But where around the world is Safari really popular? There must be places where it can claim much higher figures than 7.1%, surely. Of course there are, and, as it turns out, many of them are places you go if you don’t really want to pay taxes.

The heyday of the iPod was a huge deal for Apple. For many people, it was the first Apple product they owned, and those who fell in love with it often went on to buy other Apple products. This was sometimes referred to as the iPod halo effect, and gave Apple a mass-market reach it had never had before. Without the iPod, Apple wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful in the past decade.

We often measure and analyze the web performance of sites here on the Royal Pingdom blog. Most recently we did a study of top ecommerce sites. Now, we’ll dig into the world’s top 100 blogs.

As you might expect, performance among these top 100 blogs is a rather mixed bag. There are sites that are small, fast, big, large, and everything in between. We have all the numbers and charts for you.

Apple has been dominating the tablet market ever since the company released the iPad, so calling the current situation a tablet war might be a bit overly dramatic. But things are heating up. The number of Android-based tablets is growing, and now even Google itself has joined the fray with the Nexus 7.

What is the current standing in this “tablet war,” and how does it differ across the world? Luckily, we can get an idea by using data from StatCounter. Their data is based on web usage (visitor stats from 3+ million websites), so it will represent the tablets actively used to surf the web.

Over the past few years, social networks have become a major communications channel for today’s brands and companies. That’s why it’s surprising to see that even now, in 2012, many of the world’s top brands have a relatively weak presence on both Twitter and Facebook.

Today it’s 31 years since Microsoft finalized the purchase of 86-DOS, also known as QDOS, or Quick and Dirty Operating System. This was the operating system that would be installed on the first IBM PC, introduced in August 1981.

The rest is history, as they say. If you would want to relive the good – ahem – old days of DOS before it was even called MS-DOS, here’s how you can.

There’s no doubt that Facebook is the dominant player on the social networking scene, but just how dominating is it? We know that there are many other social networks, including the well-known LinkedIn, Twitter, and others. How do they compare with Facebook in terms of traffic, that’s the question.

Last year we published a study of social networks with more than 1 million visitors per day. Then we could spot 29 websites that made the list. This time, it’s down to 26. It seems like Facebook keeps growing and many other sites find it harder to keep users.

Since its creation by John Resig in 2005, jQuery has become one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries on the planet. It’s used by more than half of the top 10,000 websites in the world, and keeps getting more popular every day.

One question web developers using jQuery are faced with is how they should host the jQuery file. Should they host it themselves, or should they use one of the freely available content delivery networks (CDNs)?

When you depend on an external service for functionality for your own app or web service, it often makes sense to monitor it. You want to know when its API isn’t available, because that affects your app.

That’s why we were somewhat surprised when we stumbled upon this in Twitter’s API Terms of Service (their “Developer Rules of the Road”) the other day:

As the Internet keeps growing, so does the number of registered domain names. It makes sense, of course. The number of sites grows, so we need more addresses.

We recently mentioned that we are likely to pass 100 million registered domain names across all country-code top level domains this year (ccTLDs, e.g. .de, .cn, .uk, etc.).

A respectable number, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

We just wanted to let you know that we recently updated our iPhone and Android apps.

So what’s new in this version? Mainly two things:

• The ability to pause/unpause monitoring. We added a toggle control for this on the check info page. This can be handy if you need to do some maintenance and don’t want to trigger a lot of alerts, for example. Just don’t forget to start the monitoring back up when you’re done!
• An outage view, where you can also examine the reason behind each outage. This is the new default view when you tap on a check. Needless to say, this is great for troubleshooting on the go. Tapping on an outage will show you which monitoring locations first detected the outage, and the reason for the error (for example a connection timeout or an HTTP error code).

We want to create a Pingdom hero! Basically a company mascot, a superhero if you like, someone that fights for a fast web, a nirvana where sites load in a jiffy and there is no downtime. Timeouts, 500s, packet loss and other internet issues will be a thing of the past when he’s (and it’s most likely a he) in town.

Since we’ve not done anything like this before, we felt as we should share the process with you all. That includes all the ins and outs that go into creating a character, designing it, getting it manufactured, brought to you – our customers and readers, etc.

We want the process to be fun as well as educational, so hop aboard and let’s go.