JulianSchrader.de

Monitor your websites with Twitter

I guess it’s been around two weeks ago that I stumbled over a service called MoniTwitter that wasn’t online yet that day, but since I found the concept interesting, I signed up for a reminder via e-mail as soon as the service is available.

This reminder got through to me just before the weekend and I immediately created an account to test it.

Creating an account is amazingly fast compared to other apps—you only need to enter your e-mail address, twice the desired password and you may want to change the timezone to yours. Click the sign up button and you’re done.

Well, unfortunately you’re not. You’re account with MoniTwitter is indeed created, but you still need one or two twitter accounts per website you want to monitor—besides your own, the one want to receive updates with.

Create a twitter account for each website you want to get notified when errors occur and a second one for each you want to keep the loading time under surveillance.

I chose to only track errors

After creating the twitter account I’d recommend to check the box Protect my updates in your twitter account’s settings. Now log out of your website’s twitter account and log in to your own (or create one if you haven’t already).

Go to http://twitter.com/YOUR-WEBSITES-ACCOUNT and click the add as a friend link there—if you followed my advice to protect the website’s twitter stream, you didn’t create a new friendship yet. You’ll need to log into the website’s account another time to accept the just sent friend-request.

That’s it, now enter your website’s twitter account details into MoniTwitter’s add site form and you’re ready to receive MoniTwitterTweets as I’d call them.

I think it’s a very neat way to monitor your website even if the sign up process is a little cumbersome up until now. I get all twitter updates via SMS so I’m notified about possible problems as soon as twitter txts the messages to my mobile—and everything’s free!

Let me know: What do you think?