SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Web design carries with it certain challenges that don’t exist in print design. Perhaps the most obvious is that in print design, whether you print your own work or have it printed by a professional, you know what your work is going to look like before your customer sees it.
Web designers don’t have this luxury. There’s always the chance that something, or maybe many things, won’t look or behave the same from browser to browser and from operating system to operating system. It’s easy to make mistakes that can make your website appear strange or annoying to a lot of website visitors.

This April 1st the guys at Wired Magazine put together a great April Fools’ joke: A dedicated mobile device for Twitter dubbed the Wingman.
Check out this video introduction to the (then) totally fake device.

Looking back on Android’s first year on the market, there’s no denying that things have been rocky for Google’s ambitious mobile platform. There was little hardware diversity for the better part of the year, and with the hype surrounding the release of the Palm Pre, Android seemed almost instantly dated. For all of its initial hype, the platform never really seemed like much of a threat to the iPhone, and in many ways it was barely competing. It seemed as if Android was going to celebrate its first birthday merely running on the fumes of excitement from its launch.
The announcement of the Motorola Droid’s upcoming release on Verizon’s formidable 3G network changed all of that.

Do you understand your visitors? Simple information such as average length of visitor stay, peak traffic time, and a user’s navigation path is critical to webmaster success. Analyzing website traffic is not only interesting and fun, but can also boost profits and aid in delivering more relevant content.
There are countless website tracking applications available. One of the most popular is Google Analytics (GA), a beefed-up version of Urchin 6 that has been on the market since 2005. A new player on the field, Woopra, offers several unique features that sets it apart from the crowd. Can it give Google Analytics a run for its money?

Facebook is easily the most widely used social network in the world today, an international success. Since its start in 2004, it has grown to more than 300 million active users, which is unprecedented. No social network has ever been as big as Facebook is now.
This post takes a look at Facebook’s geographic expansion from its start in 2004 until today in 2009, showing how its popularity has grown year by year.

Last week we made it possible for you to get Pingdom alerts via Twitter, giving you one more way to know if your website is down.
Initially we sent you alerts from a dedicated “alert account”, @pingdomalert, but some people also wanted to be able to have these alerts sent via their own Twitter accounts instead of TO them, so now we have added that functionality as well (i.e. alerts from Pingdom as your own status updates).
Let’s have a look at the different ways people are using these alerts.

Apple’s iPhone has been a massive success in the consumer smartphone sector. But can it mount a serious challenge to phones such as Research in Motion’s Blackberry in the business marketplace? It can, providing Apple is willing to make some changes.

Last week we learned that Microsoft had scored a deal with Twitter and Facebook to allow status updates to be searchable from Bing. Shortly after, Google announced a deal with Twitter as well.
These partnerships are a sign of the growing importance of the real-time web – that smorgasbord of sites and services which allows you to broadcast whatever is going on in your life right now. Other examples include the social network Foursquare, which lets you inform your friends when you’re at a particular venue, and a variety of sites that let you instantly upload audio and video from your phone.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is in the process of developing HTML 5, an open standard that could eliminate the need for browser plugins such as Adobe’s Flash video player.
HTML 4.01, the current version of HTML that we use to create web pages and incorporate technologies such as CSS and JavaScript, has been around since December of 1999. The standard has certainly been a huge success, in that it represents a markup language which can work across all browsers and operating systems. Still, there are issues which HTML 4.01 simply wasn’t designed to address.
One of the most significant of these issues is the use of video on the Web.

Yesterday we announced that you can now get Pingdom alerts via Twitter.
So how do you activate those alerts? We have made it very easy for you:

1. Add your Twitter username to your contact(s).
2. Select “Twitter” as notification method when editing/adding a site for monitoring.

Alerts via Twitter is an excellent complement to email and SMS alerts. It’s yet another way you can get alerted by Pingdom when your websites or servers go down.

Microsoft’s iPod competitor, Zune, has been revived with the newly announced Zune HD. But in spite of positive reviews, the overall response from consumers seems to be… well, lukewarm to say the least.
To give you an idea, let’s look at the search volume (via Google Trends) to measure interest for Zune compared to the market-leading iPod over time.

Twitter is an extremely popular service with millions and millions of users, and now those users can get Pingdom alerts delivered right to their Twitter accounts.
Twitter is an excellent complement to Pingdom’s uptime monitoring service, and we’re very happy to open up our service to Twitter’s huge user base. Even better, since Pingdom now has free accounts it becomes a great companion to webmasters with a Twitter account. Getting alerted of website downtime has never been easier and never cost less (i.e. nothing).

While we were busy working, Adobe took over the Internet. More specifically, Adobe’s software took over just about every aspect of web design and development. Is this really a good thing for web designers and developers? Or for web users? Or for anyone, other than Adobe? My answer is a resolute, unwavering “No”.
Now let me explain why.

The consensus is in on Windows Mobile 6.5: According to the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo, it’s a stop-gap solution by Microsoft meant to bring some slight user interface polish and touch-screen friendliness to their aging Windows Mobile platform. It doesn’t bring Windows Mobile anywhere near the level of accomplishment that we’re seeing with the iPhone, Palm Web OS, and Android phones today – for that we’ll have to wait for the release of version 7 sometime in late 2010. Simply put, 6.5 is the Windows Me to WinMo 7’s Windows XP.

When small companies and startups look for development tools, they often look to the open source community to cut down costs. Given the choice to spend nothing on licensing for a LAMP configuration compared to thousands of dollars in Microsoft licensing fees, it doesn’t take an MBA to realize why Apache’s market share is 46.6% compared to 21.9% for Microsoft IIS. Those numbers might be about to change thanks to a new Microsoft seed program, WebsiteSpark.

The rapidly changing nature of the Web makes it necessary for web developers to constantly be on the lookout for new, shiny tools. This post will hopefully show you some cool tools you didn’t already know about.

When it comes to keeping up with blogs and other websites, a common complaint is information overload. Even if you subscribe to receive site updates through an RSS reader, it’s easy to wind up with more items in your reader than you have time to actually read. You may still want to read some of those posts, but if you don’t want to read all of them, searching through your reader for the important news items can be almost as much of a burden as going from site to site.
Because of the ongoing concern of information overload, many people who previously relied on RSS have drifted away from it. However, RSS readers are evolving to solve these issues and improve their usefulness.

Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.
While Twitter has a huge user base, it isn’t the only microblogging service on the Web. One of Twitter’s competitors that you should pay attention to is identi.ca. It combines the best, and occasionally the worst, of the microblogging and open source worlds.

Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.

One short blog post can have a major impact on how a business can be seen. One little tweet can convince thousands of customers to buy a product or to walk away from a company forever. Whether or not an employee’s online activities are sanctioned by his employer, even a little involvement with social media can have some extreme results.
This article takes a look at social media policies in action and gives some tips to companies on what they can do.