Posted by Steve Lounsbury on December 31st, 2008 
2 Comments
I thought I would continue with the “Monitoring stuff” theme and talk about how we make sure our websites are running smoothly. Over the years, we’ve collected a pretty large number of sites. It’s pretty much impossible for us to check every one of them every day just to make sure they aren’t having any problems. Naturally, being developers, we look for ways to automate this process.
Our first stab at it was a home grown script. This was done in a few hours one afternoon and was setup on a cron job. It would ping a set of sites every five minutes, check the http response header and make sure we were getting a “200 ok”. This worked for the most part, but didn’t save any history and it would continue to pester us until the site was back up.
After our needs outgrew the homegrown script, we looked for something a little more sophisticated. There are several open source options. One being Nagios. It lets you monitor any server for standard services like HTTP, FTP, SSH, etc. Also, there are several plugins available that let you monitor load, database activity, etc. It produces pretty “management friendly” graphs and has a very flexible system for notifying you when something goes wrong. This is all great, but you have to set it up and maintain it yourself. I don’t have the time to do that.
Finally, I came across pingdom.com. Pingdom is a distributed monitoring service that does one job and does it well. You can monitor all the standard services, setup notifications over email and sms, see those “management friendly” graphs and even check for certain strings on the site you are monitoring. This makes it easy to write an endpoint that checks crucial services (db, filesystem space, etc) and produces an “OK” or “BAD” message. This way, pingdom can not only let you know if your site is up and responding, but if your database is up and running too. Overall, Pingdom is exactly what we need and best of all, I don’t need to do anything to maintain it.
I’ll leave you with an example of one of those pretty graphs:
Posted by Steve Lounsbury on December 11th, 2008 No comments
Like a lot of developers, we use SVN on a day to day basis. I can’t imagine working without it. We’ve been using it for over a year now. Svnlook on revision 1 give me this:
[steve@76design ~]$ svnlook info /svn -r 1
steve
2007-08-23 18:23:03 -0400 (Thu, 23 Aug 2007)
23
Created folder remotely
And svnlook youngest gives me this:
[steve@76design ~]$ svnlook youngest /svn
6567
In a year we have over 6500 commits and many projects contained in that (now not so little) repository. Given that there are so many commits going on, we thought it would be useful to have a feed of commits happening in real time. If we had that, we could get a good feel for the activity in the office over the day. One obvious choice for a feed is RSS, and we have that too, but we thought it could be fun to have a twitter stream of our commits.
I did some quick googling and came across a Google code project called twitvn. Unfortunately, due to hosting restrictions, I was unable to get it installed on our svn server. So, like any developer would do, I wrote my own ;)
SVN provides you with some interesting ways to interact with it pre and post commit. I wanted to hook in on post-commit and fire off a twitter message with some details about the commit. Turns out it’s fairly simple to do.
After every commit, if a script is available at [svn path]/hooks/post-commit, SVN will run that script. Two arguments are provided, the svn path and the revision number of the commit. Using these two pieces of info, you can then pull out whatever details you want about that particular commit and choose to do what you want with it. Knowing that, here is the approach I took:
- Get the particulars about the commit using ’svnlook info’
- Get the modified files using ’svnlook changed’
- Determine the author and the project that was being committed
- Create a twitter message and send it using Curl
I decided to write it using PHP, mostly because it’s what I know and I wanted to get it done quickly. In order to determine the project, I assumed that the top level folder of the first modified file is the project (this will depend on your repository layout so your mileage may vary here).
The final script is called tweeter.php, grab it here.
In order to run it, drop your twitter account details into CMD_CURL_TWITTER and add this line to your post-commit file:
[path-to-php5-cli] [path-to-tweeter.php] “${REPOS}” “${REV}”
Let me know if you get some use out of it!
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on December 4th, 2008 No comments
And they look great!
Thats right, we’re growing mustaches for Mustaches for Kids. This is the 4th year we have participated and it is shaping up to be the best year ever. Thank you if you have contributed and thank you in advance if you still plan on donating to M4K.
This year’s brave growers:
Posted by Leisha on November 13th, 2008 No comments
Conair Consumer Products Inc. (with our assistance) has recently released its newest product with a contest micro-site, driving its line of hair related products to a whole new level.
Conair, Helps You Tame The Beast
For all you lovely ladies out there who can’t seem to take control of that beast we all call “hair”, I introduce to you the Infiniti Nano Silver by Conair. Simply put, it is the #1 most effective hair straightener on the market. The person who thought of adding steam to a hair straightener is an absolute genius. Not only does it make your hair look vibrant and lustrous, removes all frizz and protects it from the humidity, it takes no time at all. Take my words and check out the website to see what other features and benefits this product has to offer, www.conairsteamstraight.com.
Aside from my obsession with this fabulous “life-saver”, you deserve a little S.O.S. too. The “Tame the Beast” website, was a concept conceived by Conair and 76design/Thornley Fallis. It is your gateway to owning one of these magnificent hair straighteners along with other Conair and John Frieda hair related products. The contest closes on December 17th so don’t wait too long, visit the site, watch some videos, enter the contest and most important…don’t forget to tell your friends. The secret needs to be unleashed so go spread the word.
ENJOY!
Posted by Dom Coballe on October 28th, 2008 4 Comments
I am very excited to announce that the 76design and Thornley Fallis family has grown…yet again! Emmitt Franklin Tackaberry will be leading our new infant/toddler/youth division. His arrival on October 27, 2008 at 5:15 pm made it a little late in the day for his employee orientation, however we expect young Emmitt to be put to work in the very near future.
Father Brett, and mother Anne are in fine form and deeply proud that their little bundle will be an instant contributor at the office — once he is completely adjusted from his first 9 months of living in a sac of fluid and amino acids.
Well done Brett, Anne and Emmitt, y’all done good.
Posted by Dom Coballe on August 7th, 2008 Comments Off
It is widely known that across the universe, the unofficial 5th season is Construction Season. Which beat out Wabbit Season about 12 years ago.
Currently, when downtown you couldn’t spit without hitting a labourer or an asphalt roller. Summer construction may mean many things to different people. To some it may say that there’s growth and expansion happening. Others may connect it with an outdated infrastructure that badly needs revitalization. Regardless, we thought why not bring the experience in full “Imax-esque” glory right up into our collective grills.
Our office construction season kick-offed this past Tuesday, and it is scheduled to run to the end of the month. That means wall to wall action of drywall and reciprocating saws in HD! The image attached gives you a small glimpse of the added space coming our way. What you don’t see, is that there’s a mass of 20 people working diligently behind the camera trying their darnedest to ignore the cacophony of power tools behind those flimsy plastic drop sheets.
Personally, my annoyance has been slightly subsided since it gave me an opportunity to use the most awesome animated gif up top. Look at those little dudes diggin’ away.
To our clients, I say this to you: Service will not be interrupted throughout the entire reno process. That’s our 76satisfaction guarantee.
Interesting fun fact: alcohol consumption rose 30% in the past 2 days.
