Every time the Apple Store has some downtime, magic seems to happen, especially if it happens to be a Tuesday. Not surprisingly, we get a flood of emails from excited readers a few minutes after the yellow sticky note goes up, letting us know that we better be on our toes when the store comes back up. Follow that with some obsessive site-checking and collectively, that's a lot of manual labor. It's about time we started automating the process.
Pingdom, purveyors of website monitoring services, have produced a badge that puts the status of the Apple Store on your web page, blog, and maybe your dashboard with a web clipping. Pingdom does the work of pinging the Apple Store once per minute to determine its current state, and provides you with an image indicating up or down which is embedded in an iFrame. Simple, but effective.
So, save the wear and tear on your mouse and grab the badge rather than hitting refresh all morning this Tuesday. Pingdom also has a downtime history going, and an analysis of Apple's "marketing by downtime." After all, it is quite a well-planned marketing scheme, if not a growing national pastime for Apple fans.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-22-2008 @ 6:56PM
Gene Cowan said...
Except that the Apple Store doesn't really have "downtime" - it's always up, they just remove the pages and replace them with a placeholder. I'm not clear how a ping to the site tells us if the store is "open" or "being updated."
Reply
2-22-2008 @ 7:03PM
Brett Terpstra said...
:). Next time it's down, check the response headers. You'll see...
2-22-2008 @ 7:45PM
Pingdom said...
Gene Cowan, you are right. I ping would not make it possible to detect if the store is open or closed (up or down). We are checking the content of the site to be able to detect if the site is open or closed.
2-22-2008 @ 8:46PM
Caitlin said...
From the Pingdom website...
"A note on the monitoring: We check that the main web page of the US Apple Store answers and doesn’t return an error. We also check for a special text string on the page that is not shown on their maintenance page. We test the page once per minute and the status on the banner is also updated every minute."
2-22-2008 @ 7:10PM
virusdoc said...
If millions of us install and activate this, won't it have a DoSA effect?
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2-22-2008 @ 7:38PM
Brett Terpstra said...
No, because Pingdom does the pinging *once* per minute, the badge just gets the results from Pingdom. And @Frank below... stay tuned.
2-22-2008 @ 7:13PM
vandy1997 said...
It would be fun to have a link or an app for the iPhone!
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2-22-2008 @ 7:28PM
Frank said...
made it a widget or a menu bar item, and i'm in.
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2-22-2008 @ 7:46PM
p2rjade said...
I just added the code to my .mac page and created a webclip to check it for me.
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2-22-2008 @ 10:18PM
Big John said...
How would I make a webclip? I'd like it was a widget!
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2-22-2008 @ 11:01PM
DaBa said...
I was just looking at ical, and have noticed that the last friday of the month is the 29th... ring a bell anyone???
Apple often use the last friday of a month for their announcements & friday 29th was the date of the iphone release!!!
My guess is that the sdk(+extras) event will be held on
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 29th 2008
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2-23-2008 @ 2:36AM
sommerich said...
Actually, most announcements are on tuesdays.
2-23-2008 @ 2:40AM
gr33n said...
every time apple store is down, god kills a kitten ...
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2-23-2008 @ 8:42AM
John P said...
@Big John
Here is a dashboard widget that allows you to monitor any site: http://www.watchmouse.com/widget/dashboard_widget.php
cheers
John
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2-23-2008 @ 1:01PM
Stace said...
Does this mean that we can finally have an end to the "news" that the store is down? TUAW and Engadget both do this, and it's ridiculous. I don't want to know when the store is down -- that's not news. What's news is what's changed when it comes back up.
I swear, there are two things in the current tech blog trends I'll never get. One is the fanatical swooning whenever the Apple Store is down for maintenance and the other is unboxing videos/stories.
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2-24-2008 @ 11:37AM
basscadet said...
Amen Stace, amen :-)
2-23-2008 @ 2:09PM
Browzilla said...
Now all we need is for someone to add Growl support to the widget and I'll never have to read an "Apple Store is down" post again!
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