No, My Site’s Not Down, Is It?

I was sitting on my lunch break today, innocently checking up on the latest news as I munched on pizza sub with a Farmer’s Union iced coffee. As I scrolled through the sites on Google Reader, my very own blog appeared displaying my last post! Ok, so I wasn’t exactly surprised since I had subscribed to it, but a little dramatic effect never hurts.

As I’m sure most wannabe bloggers do, I like to regularly check out how many people have subscribed. No surprise here, as it’s still stuck on 2 (and one of which is me). Next to it though, there was this little message: (Actually I forgot to write down exactly what it said, so I just paraphrased from my memory for you.)

Google Reader is unable to update your feed due to connection issues.

In my head I questioned:

No, my site’s not down, is it? I just checked it this morning and it was fine, so there’s no way it’s down. Google must have gotten it wrong!

I pulled out my trusty bookmarks, went to downforeveryoneorjustme.com and did a quick check. You wouldn’t know it from the title but it’s a simple, no nonsense site that checks if a given website is down for everyone or just me (or you in your case).

Oh. Now I’d like to say that I was on the Digg front page, or that I’d been virally retweeted overnight, but I’m not that lucky. I’d been reorganising my office, and changed the structure of my network in the process. I forgot to check the state of my server afterwards which is a big mistake as I try to increase my pagerank.

Moral of this story: When you think Google is wrong, you are wrong! (Unless your name happens to be Chuck Norris)

UPDATE: I’m in the process of finding a simple and free website monitoring service so I can be alerted next time something happens. I’ve tried a few but they all seem pretty appalling. Can anyone recommend one that they find useful?