Mobile-friendly websites

Many people these days rely more on their mobile devices - phones, tablets etc - to access the Internet than on desktop / laptop computers. As such, it is a common requirement in many websites today that we design / test / tune the usability not just for different computer browsers but also for mobile devices.

While not every website has to cater to mobile devices this article gives some ideas on how you can make new and existing websites more mobile-friendly without requiring lots of coding or duplication.

My GoDaddy domain is down

My domain registrar (GoDaddy) is currently down (9/10/2012 11:20AM AZ) in what seems to be an attack from the group Anonymous. Not only their services are down, even their main webpage is down right now! Wow, that was ugly!

I am not hosting any of my projects with them. Everything is hosted on Google infrastructure (AppEngine, Apps for Business, Blogger etc). Unfortunately they are all down too because I still rely on GoDaddy's DNS servers! Grrrrr! :(

The only positive thing I can take from this issue is that my web monitor app Pingr worked as designed and quickly notified me about the problem. In this case there isn't much I can do to fix it though, have to wait for GoDaddy figure it out on their side. At least Pingr will tell me once their system is back up. Until then Pingr's main URL (http://pingr.eventfy.com/) will be unavailable.

P.S. If anyone else wants to receive a notification from Pingr when your system is backup you can use it from its Google AppEngine's URL: http://pingr-eventfy-com.appspot.com/.

Update: at 3:18PM AZ (about 4 hours since I found out about this issue!) my domain eventfy.com finally got back up.

It seems some sites are still affected but GoDaddy is slowly getting there. You can find a discussion about this issue here (Reddit).

Update: yesterday night (9/13) GoDaddy sent me an email taking the blame, stating that it wasn't caused by an external hacker but by themselves. Not sure if (i) I buy it and (ii) it makes me feel any safer if this is true. Anyways they gave me a 30% off new product or renewal valid for 7 days. Man, I am just happy I don't depend on this for my livelihood! :)

Server resource utilization monitoring

Pretty much every Linux distribution has tools to help sys admins monitor the utilization of common server resources such as CPU, memory and storage. For advanced monitoring and reporting we may need to install 3rd-party tools (e.g. Nagios or FAN) but sometimes we just want a simple way to get warnings when critical server resources may be close to overload.

Here is a set of simple shell scripts (tested in RHEL and CentOS) you can use to monitor CPU, memory and storage space. If utilization goes over a threshold these scripts will send you an email warning hopefully soon enough so that you can fix it before a system crash. Assuming you have access to basic commands like vmstat, df, mail and crontab these scripts can be setup even if you do not have root access to the server.