Tag Archives: plans

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Next step

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Feedback is crucial

AgentSlug.com is getting more and more feedback from our first users.  Most of it is positive and that makes me happy, but what’s more important to me is that some of it is really constructive and learning.

As a developer who has decided to make a tool based on “scratching own itch” problem, I can’t be sure what are others’ needs and why they are actually using the app.  Feedback is crucial. Many thanks to everyone for their effort.

Next step

From the first deployment date we are tuning the uptime monitoring module to make it better and more optimized. However, we are about to go further than that.

AgentSlug.com is an uptime monitoring tool for now, but we want to build on it a complementary automatic webmaster tool focused on website monitoring in many dimensions:

  • full content monitoring
    • dead links detection
    • html validation
    • spell checker
    • WAI problems detection within the content (like no [alt] attributes on images)
  • anomalies detection – if your homepage suddenly grows or shrinks it might be hacked (defaced)
  • real users’ load time
  • resources load time testing

That’s just a shortlist of the ideas that we are fully agreed are important for every webmaster or website owner.

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How it started

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Ad hoc script

The AgentSlug.com idea went out after we were unable to use one of the biggest uptime monitoring service. I decided that I’d write my own simple ad hoc script, hooked to cron jobs. It worked quite well, and then, as you’ve probably guessed, I thought that we can extend it to a service with nice interface and some additional useful functionalities.

The very first script did just the uptime monitoring.  There was no configuration workflow. Everything was hard-coded directly on the server.

On that foundation, during the last half year, we’ve made a nice and simple uptime monitoring service.  Now we’re trying to make it even more simple.

Because uptime monitoring service seems not to be enough, we want to go further and extend the AgentSlug.com to a complementary website monitoring service. With content monitoring and other useful stuff. We’ve got some plans, but we are still gathering some feedback from our very first users.

Here is a request for you, dear visitor.  If you use or will use AgentSlug.com, don’t hesitate to contact us and tell what you think. Any opinion, any idea is really important for us and we’d love to hear it.