SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

The blogging service Blog.com was unavailable almost 8 hours straight last Friday (January 16).
The outage started at 5:05 a.m. CET and didn’t end until 12:50 p.m. CET (a total of 7 hours and 45 minutes). The site was completely unreachable during that time, indicating either a server or network failure.

Sometimes you just need to take a short break, relax and have fun. A great way to do so is to check out some funny web comics, and we here at Pingdom are big fans of comics that dive into the slightly more geeky aspects of life. Once a tech geek, always a tech geek…
So, sit back and relax, take a few moments to yourself and check out some of the best tech comics around.

We all know that Wordpress is popular among bloggers, and Movable Type as well. But HOW popular? And what other platforms are being used? To find out, we went through the Technorati top 100 blogs and investigated what blog platforms they are using. It turned out to be a highly interesting survey with plenty of surprises along the way.
As a by-product we also found out some interesting things about the more popular blog networks. For example, did you know that Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker Media together have 22 of the top 100 blogs?

We have released an iPhone application that can be used with the Pingdom uptime monitoring service. The aptly named Pingdom iPhone app lets you easily connect to Pingdom and view the current status of the monitoring you have set up.
This is a handy companion when you receive a problem alert from Pingdom, indicating an error with your website or servers. Just start the Pingdom iPhone app and examine the current status from your iPhone.

Remember “social search”? There has been plenty of buzz around this term in the past couple of years, but here’s a super-quick reminder from Wikipedia if you’re fuzzy on the details:

Social search or a social search engine is a type of web search method that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users.

Sounds like a smart way to at least complement more traditional approaches to Web search, and we are sure it has a future. There are plenty of services vying for a place in this space, such as Mahalo and Wikia Search. However, while we were doing research about Web terminology trends last week, we stumbled upon this very interesting little nugget:
Social search seems to be strictly a US phenomenon, at least judging by Google search statistics.

CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) are becoming increasingly popular. The obvious benefit is that they can help websites to give end users a speedier web surfing experience, but there is also another very positive side effect for the entire Internet, and it will become more noticeable the more common CDNs become.
The positive side effect is this: More CDN usage means less load on the Internet backbone.
Why? It all comes down to how most CDNs work.

Netvibes-competitor Pageflakes was unavailable for close to 7 hours last Friday (January 9).
The longest outage started at 1:49 p.m. EST, when the site went down for 6 hours and 38 minutes. It was completely inaccessible during this time.

Lego started selling their now world-famous bricks 60 years ago, and has a certain inherent geek appeal (after all, Lego bricks are kind of like 3D pixels, and you can be endlessly creative with them).
This post shows what happens when computer geeks combine their love for Lego with their love for certain popular tech companies and their logos.

The Web has created its own set of words, but their popularity change over time. We have checked the trends for 45 different Web-related terms such as “social media”, “blogging”, “RSS”, “Web 2.0” and their like. For your convenience, we have collected the results in a handy, alphabetically sorted table that you can see below.
We have focused on the popularity of general terminology, not products. For example, we included the term “microblogging”, but not “Twitter”.

As Lifehacker noted yesterday, Mr Uptime is now (finally) available for Firefox 3. Mr Uptime for Firefox 2 proved to be highly popular, and we have received a lot of requests for an updated version for Firefox 3, so here it is!
For those of you not familiar with Mr Uptime, it’s a Firefox extension (from us here at Pingdom) that will make sure you don’t miss cool content online just because a website is temporarily down.

It’s a common scenario: A new website launches after having built up a lot of hype around its service or product, only to almost immediately crash due to overwhelming traffic. These launch troubles are almost always scalability-related.
We see this happening a lot. It may sound like a luxury problem (wow, too many users!), but think about it: If you’ve created something special and spent lots of effort building up expectations and buzz around your product, you don’t want anything to stand in the way of people finally trying it out, do you?
Here are some real-world launch troubles from 2008, and advice on how to avoid these kinds of problems.

Since 2002, Google has honored 25 historical people with custom-made versions of the Google logo, displayed for one day on the Google homepage.
Judging by the people Google have selected so far, don’t expect any WWF wrestling stars to show up anytime soon. It’s an elite collection of highly influential scientists, artist and architects who have made their mark on human history and culture.
Here they are, all 25 of them, in reverse chronological order.

Every year, companies find that someone has registered domain names involving their trademarks, or variations of their domain names that are confusingly similar to the original. If a solution can’t be found by talking to the registrant of the offending domain name(s), a formal dispute usually follows.

WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization (an agency of the UN), has an arbitration and mediation center for domain disputes, and they continually publish the results of these disputes, as well as related facts and figures.

We have summarized some of the most interesting data in this article, and we have also tried to figure out the underlying reason for the increase in domain disputes. Well, at least we have a pretty good theory involving Google AdSense…

Many of the major websites have localized versions of their pages for different countries. Most of the time it’s just a plain translation of their “regular” website (for example Apple Japan, Yahoo Japan and MSN Japan, to name just a few), but sometimes localization is taken a BIG step further.

First of all, a big thank you to all our readers. We hope we have been able to provide you with interesting, fun and thought-provoking articles over the past year, and if you have discovered this blog recently, thank you for joining our ranks!

We have published more than 200 posts in 2008. Since we won’t be updating the blog until next Monday (December 29), here is a selection of our very best and most popular posts from 2008 to keep you entertained in the meantime.

Christmas is upon us, and like the geeks we are here at Pingdom, we couldn’t help but check out how our fellow geeks worldwide are handling their Christmas decorations. We found some very cool examples where people have put together über-geeky Christmas trees, wreaths and other decorations. And then of course there’s that Christmas tree network monitoring system…

That empty surface on a laptop computer is just begging to be decorated, and when you’re a geek, you decorate in geek style. Here are 14 great examples!

We have gathered 10 of the most noteworthy incidents on the Internet in 2008. This was another eventful year, full of its share of accidents and incidents that disrupted the Internet and the WWW. We have included problems ranging from website outages and service issues to large-scale network interruptions. You are sure to recognize several of them.

The ancient Greeks were so ahead of their time that sometimes you are truly humbled. Just look at the amazing calendar device called the Antikythera mechanism. (Video included further down.)

The Antikythera mechanism did several things:

• It showed the position and movement of the sun, moon and planets.
• It worked as a calendar.
• It kept track of when the Olympic games and other events were being held.
• It predicted solar eclipses.

It’s the world’s oldest known complex scientific calculator, and some have even gone as far as calling it a computer.

Sometimes bad things just happen, we all know that. And sometimes they happen to our loved ones (we’re talking about our computers here).

For the last five years the data recovery company Kroll Ontrack has been publishing a yearly list of strange ways people have broken their computers and/or hard drives. We here at Pingdom have gone through those press releases and handpicked the funniest and most bizarre incidents, for your reading pleasure.