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Free website monitoring that doesn’t suck (sort of)

www.montastic.com lets you keep an eye on up to 100 sites. It checks every 10 minutes or so and alerts you if the status of your sites changes via email. You can even monitor it via RSS or by using Yahoo widgets. But email works just fine for me. The best part about it is that it’s brain dead easy to use.

Edit: I am not as impressed with montastic now that I have used it for a while. I have received several false alarm emails when the site isn’t down. And it seems to take it a long time to figure out that the site is back up. I usually get an email the day after I fix the site telling me that everything is OK. Not so helpful, but still not bad for a free monitoring service.

June 7
Vacations vs. Family Trips

I just returned from a nice family trip in Southern California. There is definitely a difference between vacations and family trips. A true vacation, as in a rest or a break, would probably not involve kids. I enjoyed reading Justin’s take on The Happiest Place On Earth. It was fun spending time in the sun with Justin and Marion and Dave and their families. We played at the beach/pool and spent a few days at the Disneyland. Legoland was fun too. This time the kids had earned their own money, although somehow it all still came out of my bank account. Anyway, enjoy the photos…
http://flickr.com/photos/caswell_tom/sets/72157605456925458/

June 7
Trip to China

I got back from an Open Education conference in Dalian, China a couple days ago. Dalian is the most popular tourist city for the Chinese, but you’ve probably never heard of it. Funny how little we know about other countries. Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures of both Beijing and Dalian. Here are some links to some Flickr albums I made from my China photos:

Dalian, China – 2008 Open Education..

Beijing, China – Forbidden City and Houtongs

Great Wall of China

“Temple of Heaven” Beijing, China

April 30
My photos are still wandering…

Recently, I wrote a post called Letting your Flickr photos wander. Someone saw this post on reddit and asked me if I had a trick to detecting when people reuse my photos on Flickr. The truth is that many people are good enough to send me a note on Flickr to let me know they used my photo. I also set up a Google alert for my flickr username: caswell_tom. That way if someone gives me attribution I get an alert. Here is another case of reuse I found via a Google alert. I’m not a pro, but it’s always fun to see where my photos end up.

April 4
Done with weddings

I think I have been a really good sport. Two weddings in two months! Luckily all of my brothers and sisters are married now, so I am hoping to not have to attend any more weddings for a while. I’ll defer to Justin’s rant on weddings so I don’t have to write one.

March 22