2009 was a good year for me and some great accomplishments were made. I graduated with my Software Engineering Degree, I got ‘best project’ of 2009, I started my job as lead developer over at Reckless New Media and I have begun several important projects of my own.

Towards the beginning of 2009 I began work on the Football Badges app, which now has (at time of writing) well over 35,000 active users, with over 15,000 signing up each month. With the success of this project I decided to branch out with some similar projects including University Badges and more recently Baseball Badges. As expected Uni Badges has not been as popular with only 1,000 active users, Baseball Badges however is growing very fast, and it’s rate of growth reflects that of Football Badges.

Another finished project taken on this year was Downtime Preventer, a system built to notify web site owners of downtime via email and SMS within minutes (if not seconds) of the downtime occurring.

A joint project that is completed that was launched earlier this year is QueryLife. QueryLife is a social network that asks thought-provoking questions to users every day. Users can add their friends and view/comment on friends answers. Answers are not simple text-based answers, but can instead be stories told by text, imagery and video. The project has been created in a partnership between myself and the guys over at Creative Happy.

Other projects that are VERY close to deployment are ‘Officing’ and ‘Dont U Forget’, both web applications built for specific purposes and unlike anything out there at the moment.

So, my plan for the first quarter of the new year is:

• Promote Downtime Preventer
• Complete Officing and deploy live
• Complete Dont U Forget and deploy
• Market QueryLife

Once I’m happy that this list has been satisfied I will not doubt begin a new project, maybe something to do with Andoird…

One place I have found exceeding expectation though, is a web site offering downtime alerts and downtime notifications. The clever system checks your web site periodically for PHP errors, Apache errors, 404’s, 403’s, poor re-directs, etc. It also pings the server, does some TCP checks and does some HTTP header checks, all to see if your site is online and working as it should be. If there are no errors then all is kept silnet, if something is found though, you’ll receive a free email. These emails are limited to 4 a day so you don’t get 2,000 emails in your inbox should your site go down over night.

As a lot of us aren’t around 24/7 to check our emails but want to know the second our site goes down, this downtime alerts service also offers SMS alerts to your mobile phone. Where these alerts aren’t entirely free, they are cheap and capped to one a day, so you know you’re not going to be shelling out an arm and a leg. It’s dead easy to add credits and worth while doing in my opinion: your site might only go down once every 6 months and it’s oh so very easy to miss an email (be it because of spam, poor filters, or just human error), but you’ll never miss an SMS and you’ll see it straight away. You’re also able to do something about it straight away; with your phone in your hand ready to make the important phone call to your tech guy!

So, enough plugging – go and sign up.