Pingdom brings Apple Store downtime hysteria to your website

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.

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Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=251

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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...

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David V

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!

February 23 2008 at 2:09 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Stace

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.

February 23 2008 at 1:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to Stace's comment

basscadet

Amen Stace, amen :-)

February 24 2008 at 11:37 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John P

@Big John
Here is a dashboard widget that allows you to monitor any site: http://www.watchmouse.com/widget/dashboard_widget.php

cheers
John

February 23 2008 at 4:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

gr33n

every time apple store is down, god kills a kitten ...

February 23 2008 at 2:39 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

daba

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

February 22 2008 at 11:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to daba's comment

Andrew Sommerich

Actually, most announcements are on tuesdays.

February 23 2008 at 2:34 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Big John

How would I make a webclip? I'd like it was a widget!

February 22 2008 at 10:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

p2rjade

I just added the code to my .mac page and created a webclip to check it for me.

February 22 2008 at 7:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

frank