Website Uptime Lite
Overview
How reliable is your website? Website Uptime Lite is a lightweight Windows program which sits in the System Tray and quietly checks the online status of your websites, and warns you if your website is unavailable or generating errors.
Download it here: Website Uptime Installer (382k bytes).
I'm always grateful for any suggestions for improvements. Please contact me with your suggestions.
Credits: Website Uptime Lite uses icons (and derivatives) from Mark James' excellent Silk Icons. Many thanks.
Webmasters: If you want to keep Website Uptime Lite out of your site, see Notes For Webmasters at the end of this document.
Instructions
When you start Website Uptime Lite for the first time the Sites Tab is visible:
Main window
Adding A Site
The first time it is run, Website Uptime Lite doesn't know anything about your sites. To add a site, simply click on Add button and enter the site's address in the box that appears. This can either be just the site's URL, or it can be to a specific page on the site*.
Adding a Site
Check the Retrieve Headers Only checkbox to have Website Uptime retrieve just the document headers rather than the whole document. This reduces the amount of bandwidth used.
Repeat this process for all the sites you wish to check.
Editing A Site
To change a site's address, click on it's address in the grid, and click the Change button. Or you can simply double-click on it in the grid. Correct the address in the box that appears, and click Ok.
Editing a Site
When you add or change a site, Website Uptime will check whether it is forbidden to load that page by looking for a robots.txt file in the site's root directory. If a robots.txt file is found, and it forbids access by Website Uptime then the site will be tagged in the list as "Forbidden" and the site will not be checked.
Forbidden by robots.txt
Deleting A Site
To delete a site, click on the site's address in the grid, and click the Delete button. You will be promoted to make sure you really want to delete the site. Click Ok to delete the site, and Cancel to leave the site as it is.
Deleting a Site
To visit a site (for example, to make sure you typed it's address correctly) click on the Visit Site button.
* Website Uptime Lite is only really designed to check whether a site is available. You can use it to monitor the status of individual pages (for example for errors such as 404 Not Found, etc.) but this isn't really what the program is designed for.
Start Monitoring
Use the first two toolbar buttons to start and stop monitoring your websites.
Toolbar Buttons
To start monitoring your sites, click the
Start button . To stop, click the
Stop button.
When you start monitoring, all sites will be checked immediately, and then the progress bar will show how long it will be until the next check.
If an error is detected on one of your sites the program icon will flash as
a warning that something is wrong. You can stop it flashing by clicking the
Stop Flashing button. The icon will start flashing again if another
error is detected.
Once Website Uptime Lite has started monitoring your sites,
click on the
Minimise To Tray button to hide Website Uptime Lite so
you can get on with your work without interruption. You may also click on the
in the title bar to
hide the main window. The program icon will still be visible in the System
Tray.
Icon in System Tray
Double-clicking on the icon will reopen the main window. You can also right-click on the icon to start and stop the program, or to stop the flashing alert after an error has been detected on one of your sites.
Normally, the icon should be as above. If a problem is found with one of your sites, the icon will flash to alert you of the problem. Double-click on the icon to see which site has the problem, and what the problem is.
If monitoring has been stopped, then the icon will change to show a red dot rather than a green arrow.
Logging
While monitoring sites, Website Uptime Lite maintains a log of the sites it visits and the result. Click on the "Log" tab, to view the log:
Log tab
The log displays a log of the current session.
The contents of the log depends on your Logging settings (see below).
Click Clear Log to clear the log, or Save Log to save the log to a text file.
Settings
The settings tab allows you to configure various aspects of Website Uptime Lite:
Settings tab
Connection
Connect On Startup: If this box is checked, then Website Uptime Lite will automatically start checking your sites whenver it is started.
Animate On Failure: If checked, Website Uptime Lite will flash it's icon whenever Website Uptime Lite encounters a problem with one of your sites. It is recommended you leave this checked.
Hide When Running: When checked, Website Uptime Lite will
automatically hide in the System Tray when it is busy checking sites.
Note: if you check this box while Website Uptime Lite is running, it will
hide and you'll need to click on the clock icon to restore it.
The Connect every ... Hours and ... Mins drop down boxes enable you to set the frequency that Website Uptime Lite checks your sites.
Logging
This section controls whether and how logging is performed.
Log History: When this is checked all failed connections will be written to the Log.
Log Successes: Checking this box will log all successful connections. This setting is ignored if Log History is unchecked.
Clear Log After: If this box is checked, the log will be cleared once it reaches the number of lines indicated in the ... Lines dropdown box.
Updates
This section controls whether Website Uptime Lite checks for updates, and also enables you to check for updates manually.
Check for updates automatically on startup: If this is checked, then Website Uptime Lite will check for an update each time it is run. If an update is available then a message box will appear inviting you to visit the site to download a new version:
Update Available
Click Check Now to check for updates manually.
Save and Load
Click on Save Settings to save your settings to disk. Website Uptime will load this information the next time it runs. If you forget to do this, your settings will be safved when you exit the program.
You can load the last saved settings by clicking on Load Settings.
When you save your settings, Website Uptime Lite remembers your settings between sessions, and will load them the next time it runs.
Note: If you have upgraded from an earlier version then if old settings are found, the following dialog will be displayed:
Old Settings Found
Click on Yes to try to load the old settings file, and No to start from scratch.
Error Filtering
New in version 1.12, you can now choose which errors will be considered to be serious enough to alert you of the problem. The errors to be ignored/monitored are configured in the Filtering tab.
Filtering Tab
The default settings are recommended, as they will, for example, not alert you in the event that you lose your connection to the internet or an internal error occurs.
If you make any changes to the filters, you must save them if you want them to be used each time you run the program as they are not saved by default. You can restore the settings to their default values by clicking on the Load Defaults button.
Exiting The Program
To exit, use the File | Exit menu. As noted above, click on the Close Button in the title bar will not exit the program, but will minimise it to the system tray. You can also exit the program by right-clicking on the icon in the system tray and selecting the Quit menu option.
Notes for Webmasters
Website Uptime Lite honours robots.txt as described in the paper A Standard for Robot Exclusion. If you wish to forbid Website Uptime Lite from downloading pages from your site, then place an entry in your robots.txt. This can be specific to Website Uptime (all versions) or all robots. For example:
User-agent: * Disallow: /
Will prevent all robots from accessing your files, or:
User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: /
will prevent just Website Uptime from fetching them.
To keep Website Uptime out of just certain areas of your site, use partial strings to indicate the areas to exclude. For example:
User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: /downloads/
Will prevent Website Uptime from accessing the /downloads directory on your site.
Note: Website Uptime will ignore Disallow: strings containing wildcards other than a single *, thus:User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: *which is considered equivalent to:
User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: /In particular, Website Uptime will not correctly interpret strings such as:
User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: /files/*.zip
Also, Website Uptime ignores extended syntax not defined in the original paper so for example in an entry such as:
User-agent: websiteuptime Disallow: / Allow: /content/
the final Allow: will be ignored.
Please note that I am currently unavailable, and cannot take on any new website repair work, nor supply any of the services listed on the services page.