A community-led project, providing space to meet and network, all to create a cooperative learning environment and foster outreach, education, fundraising, all in a virtual environment.
Greg left a note mentioning the free monitoring service, Monastic. It doesn't have as much functionality as SiteUpTime.com, but you can monitor 100 sites. If all you are doing is trying to track when your site(s) are down then it seems like this might be a better solution than SiteUpTime. So, as an experiment I have both monitoring systems monitoring the Tech Soup in Second Life site. If I have any revelations, I'll share.
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Written by: Creech
Recently I had an Skype message from Susan, our "nonprofit administrator herder" for the Nonprofits in Second Life project. I have to assume that she was posting to the site, or perhaps reading some recent content. In any case, she IMed me because the site was down. I'm acting as the Web master, so this made good sense. I probed a little bit and came to the conclusion that the server was completely unresponsive.
I sent a quick note to our very good friends at Social*Signal who have generously donated the server space. It turned out that it was a system-wide issue with the hosting company that they work with.
So how can a nonprofit track uptime/downtime of sites they run? Obviously you can't sit and watch your site all the time. You can use software that sends a request to your server every so often and the software waits for a response from the server–no response means the site is probably down. If you don't have the skill set to set up this kind of monitoring software, there is a free or nearly free solution out there–http://www.siteuptime.com. It takes five minutes to set up and it will start monitoring your site immediately. If you only have one site to monitor, it is free. Three sites cost $5/month. Six sites cost $10/month.
Site uptime is now enabled for the NPSL site. I get an email when the site goes down, when it comes back up, and a report each month on how much time was offline.
Written by: Creech
Written by: Creech
Today we were introduced to the nonprofit commons and the offices associated with them. As I've written before, Tech Soup, part of CompuMentor, is helping organize an amazing conglomerate, on Second Life, of nonprofits. The land donor, anshe chung studios, has done an amazing job creating a truly breath taking space.
The donation of the land is significant, but add the amount of programming hours that have gone into the sim and then the $200 or so it costs to maintain per month…well it is an amazing gift.
!["Snapshot_014.bmp"]("http://farm1.static.flickr.com/161/431505050_6cb230cb61.jpg")
The commons has an amphitheatre for meetings, events and so forth. As you can see, the space is vast and the environment is pretty amazing.
The office spaces are huge. I'm not sure how we are going to furnish ours without the furniture becoming lost.
!["Snapshot_016.bmp"]("http://farm1.static.flickr.com/185/431510132_2995997bd1.jpg")
I think that the final product will truly rock and will generate lots of attention.
So, stay tuned and be ready to take a step inworld. I think it will be worth it.
Written by: Creech
I am the Senior Director of Technology at WESTAF, an arts non-profit that focuses on arts infrastructure in the western state of the US.
I have a personal blog at , http://www.dogstar.org which focuses on arts non-profits and Web 2.0, although you will see general NPT, a little travel, policy, and other various sundries.
Written by: Creech