I've added a new feature to Blogspot Watch. Now, in addition to telling you whether it's up or down, I'm logging the ups and downs, and using them to calculate the percentage of down time for the past twenty-four hours. I display this at the bottom of my link list, just above the "Moveable Type" ad. As I type this, Blogspot just came back up after a twelve-minute outage. The percentage downtime over the past twenty four hours is 16.3%.

For those who are interested, the log itself can be viewed here.

[Update at 11:09 AM PDT]

Per popular request (i.e., one person asked me, and no one has objected), I've moved all the Blogspot status stuff to the same place, just to the left (until this message scrolls down). I've also added a permalink to the log.

I should also note, that if you see a 0.0%, that's not because Ev magically healed it. That's the default number in the template, which appears whenever I do a page update (adding or editing posts). Note that the default traffic signal is green also, so a 0.0% means that blogspot isn't necessarily up, even though the signal says it is (the way it's been lately, maybe I should make the red signal the default...)

Any, just check back in a minute or so, and you'll see the right number, with the correct blogspot status, after the background script does its update. Another way to check is to view the log, and see what the last entry was (up or down).

Your improvements are great. If you don't mind my criticism, however, they are placed in the wrong spot on the page. Move them to under the Blogspot status icon.

Anyone have any idea why they are having such unbelievable trouble keeping their servers online? I can't think of any other site which fails as often.

My guess is that it isn't a server problem, per se--it's bandwidth.

I'm afraid I monitor my referer logs somewhat closely when I'm bored, and I routinely get a huge number of refers from blogspot-based sites (especially from Reynolds). So I can tell when Blogspot goes down because my refer rate drops to zero.

What that means is that it isn't just that I can't get in when I try, but that **no-one** is getting in. If the problem were bandwidth saturation, then some people would be getting in and some would not be, and my refers would continue apace even if I myself couldn't reach the thing. As I write this, it's been several minutes since the last refer from a blogspot site (as compared typically to several a minute).

I don't believe it. I don't think it's a bandwidth problem.

And when it switches back on, I can see that happen, too. Like just happened.

Then maybe all the hits bring it to its knees in some other way. It's hard to imagine that they're really rebooting that often. Sometimes it just goes down for a minute or two. Of course, it might be some combination of line saturation and server down, where the short-term outages are due to saturation.

Ahh! Much better.

As I understand your script and color scheme, perhaps you could make the default color yellow until a positive status determination is made.

A yellow light..

Good idea. I'll do it as soon as I can get around to creating the image.