Both of these services still have their quirks, but such is the case with most things in life (and on the web) that are free. Still, i have been using them both for a few days now and together they have already proved to be quite useful. Here’s why..

I’ll start with Montastic, since it’s key feature is simplicity and ease of use.

1. after signup, you just need to click on the link that says: “Add a Web Server to Monitor”
2. then enter a URL to begin monitoring that web server (it takes a few seconds to start working)
3. a green “computer icon” means your server is online (red means offline)
4. optionally, set a “name” for this URL to make it easier for you to identify

that’s it. everything has a nice, clean ajaxy feel. the site is fast and relatively easy to navigate.
you can also get some extra details, like “last monitored” and “status change” by clicking on the “info” link next to the icon for the server you’re monitoring.

both of these services have an email notification system. but, so far, my experience has been that only this one (montastic) actually works. a recent server outage (not this site) proved that for me today. Both of these services also offer alerts in the form of feeds that seemed to work fine.

3 features that make this service unique:

1. they offer a yahoo widget that reports the status of your servers in real-time, right on your desktop
2. the offer a netvibes module which is slick as a brick (it’s not too pretty by it works great)
3. they offer: “the green page” (you’re totally going to have to see this page for yourself to understand)

On to Mon.itor.us – which is a slightly more complex service, allowing for a flood of potential awesomeness and quite a few annoyances as well. Basically, my biggest problem with this service so far is: “It’s Flaky”. By that, i mean, it’s plagued with all the same bugs and buggers that PageFlakes has, even burdoned by the same ajax desktop interface – it seems. Without going into too much detail (ie: constant page refreshes and a login that will never remember you), this would be another example of one of the reasons that i have been a strong supporter of Netvibes for so long.

That being said, Mon.itor.us has a lot of already working features that come packed in with it’s service.

From their site (and because i’m sometimes lazy), here are the ones that stood out the most for me:

• Site performance archive
• Inline site previews
• Personalized pages and tabbed views
• Drag and drop interactive interface
• Todo tasks with notification and ability to add notes
• Support these protocols for testing: http, https, ftp, smtp, pop3, and ping.
• Daily/weekly/monthly uptime reports and statistics

And in case that wasn’t enough for you.. here’s a few more things that i noticed mon.itor.us can do that wasn’t already mentioned in the previous list. These are the real clinchers for me.

6 more features that make this service unique:

1. there’s a cool Google Gadget for this service out there somewhere
2. you can tag each URL / server you are monitoring and then organize / view them by groups
3. you can switch between real-time table, bar chart, and line chart views.
4. view stats for each protocol, snapshots of all your servers
5. view from three seperate geographical locations (US, DE, AT)
6. there’s some javascript code that goes along with the google gadget that will let you put your “snapshot” on virtually any web page

All in all, i would say that it’s a little harder to setup each URL with mon.itor.us, when compared to montastic. But once you get all your servers setup for monitoring, there’s a lot more you can do with them too.

Still, as i mentioned earlier, i was quite pleased with both of these services and will continue to test each one more thoroughly in the coming months.

i’ve browsed the library of modules (94 modules at last count).
i’ve added some modules (with one click) to my netvibes page.

one modules that i particularly like was the “Web Search” module.

at first glance, the name alone doesn’t appear very impressive. in fact, some particularly astute observers might say: “hey, that’s nothing special. doesn’t the default netvibes page already include a search google, yahoo, icerocket, wikipedia?”.

what make this modules different, and the reason i thought it might be a useful addition to my netvibes page is because it lets you add any search engine. not just the 4 search engines mentioned above. what’s more (and this was the kicker for me), if you can make sense of “search query urls“, you can create any number of refined, or specialized searches for any given search engine.

For example, let’s say i wanted to search del.icio.us from my netvibes page using the Web Search module:

The first thing i would do is go to the actual del.icio.us site and enter a search term like “technews” into their search box. Once you land on the results page, take a look at the URL in the addressbar of your browser.

In this case, i get the following url in the addressbar on the results page:

http://del.icio.us/search/?all=technews

Note that the term i used “technews” appears in the URL (at the very end).

Congratulations, you’ve just figured out the logic behind a basic del.icio.us search and can now make sense of “search query urls”.

The only thing left to do now is replace the search term “technews” with the symbol %s so that the newly modified URL reads as follows:

http://del.icio.us/search/?all=%s

Paste this new URL into the Web Search module to complete the configuration and hit save. You can now search del.icio.us from your netvibes page.

i also added technorati search in a similar way.

http://www.technorati.com/tags/%s

(in case anyone was wondering).

obviously, the very first thing you need to do is add the actual “Web Search” module to your netvibes page before you can configure it to use new search engines, but the entire process went relatively smoothly for me.

also, you could probably add more specific custom searches, as i mentioned earlier in this post.
for instance, searching tags for specific users of del.icio.us or the “blog search” feature in technorati could be configured (just apply the same steps taken above).

to end my experience, i added my entire “technews” tab to the ecosystem to be shared with all netvibes users but there was a message about it needing to be validated before it becomes available to all users. [ Update: It didn't actually take very long to validate and my "TechNews" tab can be seen on the "Tabs" page of the netvibes ecosystem, with all the other shared tabs. ]

so until then (it might already be validated – i haven’t checked in a few hours) and to end this post i’ll add the code i got to let visitors add my “technews” tab to their Netvibes page.

here goes..

if you click on the button, it will add a bunch of tech related sites to your netvibes page as a new tab. your existing tabs will remain undisturbed. so enjoy!

Here’s a breakdown of all the new features added or upgraded since my previous post:

1. Compatibility with Opera web browser [ December 12, 2005 ]
2. To Do list module – i love this one – [ December 30, 2005 ]
3. Yahoo mail module – similar to the Gmail module – [ January 2, 2006 ]
4. Gmail module upgrade – set a title and no. of items to display – [ January 2, 2006 ]
5. To Do list upgraded – set a title and color, and more – [ January 2, 2006 ]
6. POP IMAP module – secure connections, webmail URL, more – [ January 2, 2006 ]
7. RSS module upgraded – set a color for each feed – [ January 2, 2006 ]

You’ll notice that all but the first 2 features/upgrades were actually added on the same day. i am consistently impressed with the rate at which Netvibes puts out new modules. it seems they’re really on to something here. i’m sure that there’s definitely room for many more interesting modules in the near future.

On a side note, i remember when the Gmail module was first added to Netvibes. At the time, i didn’t even have a Gmail account yet. Back then i was thinking to myself, i wish Netvibes had that feature for Yahoo Mail. It’s funny, because now that they do offer the Yahoo Mail module, i realized that yahoo.com domains don’t get free POP access (although apparently many international yahoo domains do. – ie: yahoo.fr) – so i wouldn’t have been able to use the module even if it was available, and i still can’t use it. Here’s to hoping that Yahoo catches on to this problem, because this is not the first time i’ve had the opportunity to access my POP account from a different web based service/software and haven’t been able to. As i have mentioned before, i am slowly moving over to from Yahoo Mail to Gmail – and no POP access is one of my main reasons for doing this. i know that Yahoo Mail is in the process of getting a complete overhaul, but this is all happening behind the scenes and i’m just not sure how much longer i can wait.

Anyway, i’ll probably set up the POP IMAP module and test it out next. i’ve already been using the To Do list module for a little while and find that this is a great addition to the Netvibes content set. I’ve always felt that a full-blown desktop app for something as trivial as a To Do list was overkill. Here’s the perfect solution. Overall, there are probably a lot more situations like this involving bloated softwares, etc. And i think that if the folks at Netvibes can keep this in mind, they’ll likely find inspiration for many more modules. Nevertheless, from the looks of things, i get the impression they aren’t having too many problems in the inspiration department.

For more info and all the latest news you can visit the Netvibes blog.

Count ‘em, 4 new features added to NetVibes in the last 7 days – now that’s just impressive.

I’ve actually been casually using netvibes to for simple stuff like checking the weather and comparing prices between 2 similar products (like ipod nano vs. ipod mini prices). I also had a few RSS feeds loaded up just for convenience and a couple of notes in the “webnote” section.

But the following New Improvements finally got me to sign up:

1. Managing your Feeds (i wasn’t going to add feeds if i couldn’t move, rename, or delete them – it would just get too disorganized)
2. OPML import/export (i think the import feature may have been around all along but the export is new)
3. New Webnote features (being able to give each note a title makes them easy to spot and making hyperlinks clickable/live lets me add quick links to the side of my page)
4. The Bookmark Module (just added, this module lets you add or import your bookmarks as well as tag them for easy browsing later on)

I especially like the “alternative use” for the tag list area described on the netvibes blog. Using this technique you can pick from your existing tags instead of re-typing commonly used tags over and over again. This is similar to the way you can pick tags in del.icio.us and is a huge time saver for me.

Other Features in the Works to look out for include:

1. the Stock Quotes module
2. the Flickr module [ update: this feature was added on Dec. 8/05 and it looks pretty cool. ]
3. the ToDo List module [ update: this feature was added on Dec. 30/05 and is also cool. ]

There are a lot more features on the way that i haven’t even mentioned here but you can visit their blog to get more info.

The best part about netvibes is that you get an enormous amount of control over your personal page without ever having to register, fill in an email address, pick a username/password, or any of that jazz. The result is, you can’t help but customize it, reorganize it, and sort of grow attached to it. So much so, that i eventually begin to worry about accidentally clearing my browser cache and losing “all that work” in the blink of an eye. As soon as that happened, wouldn’t you know it.. i found myself right back on the sign up page looking to fill out that blasted registration form. doh.

On the upside, i can now login to my netvibes page from anywhere with an internet connection. Oh, and i can finally clear my cache.

[ For more on Netvibes, you can read my most recent article entitled: "Netvibes is on the move again." ]