TIP: Check if a web site is down + cool FireFox hack

Posted by Chad Myers on May 19, 2008

I was having problems connecting to a web site and I managed to stumble into a web site via Google to check to see if a web site is really down or not (get a second opinion) and I found this site:

http://www.computerhope.com/cgi-bin/isitup.cgi

But even cooler than that, they had a tip for FireFox that allows you to bookmark that URL and assign a ‘keyword’ to it. I hadn’t seen this before, but apparently it’s an old feature in FireFox.

So now I can just type: ping www.yahoo.com

And it takes me to the computerhope link above and tells me whether it’s up or not. Sweet!

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About Chad Myers

Chad Myers is the Director of Development for Dovetail Software, in Austin, TX, where he leads a premiere software team building complex enterprise software products. Chad is a .NET software developer specializing in enterprise software designs and architectures. He has over 12 years of software development experience and a proven track record of Agile, test-driven project leadership using both Microsoft and open source tools. He is a community leader who speaks at the Austin .NET User's Group, the ADNUG Code Camp, and participates in various development communities and open source projects.
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  • Dirk

    … and in IE, you can add a search provider with the following URL:
    http://www.computerhope.com/cgi-bin/isitup.cgi?domain=TEST

    -as if I don’t have enough search providers as it is :-)-

  • http://vstrac.devjavu.com Mladen Mihajlovic

    Yeah the keyword thing has been in Firefox forever and I’m always surprised that people don’t know about it. I’ve created bookmarks for all search sites I use (g for google, m for mobygames, gamespot , etc…) and I removed my search bar from the top. Much cleaner now :)

  • http://choosetheforce.com Chuck Rector

    Here’s another service of that variety I found while tweeting around.

    http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

  • http://chadmyers.lostechies.com Chad Myers

    @Chuck:

    Yeah, except when I tried that, it was down! lol

    So then I went searching for something else and found the Computer Hope version.