AppCenter Spotlight: Web Watcher
Know when your websites are misbehaving!
Web Watcher by KJ Lawrence is a native app that aims to replace third-party services for something your computer is perfectly capable of doing on its own: monitoring websites.
While it might seem trivial at first, Web Watcher fills a niche for me that I’ve long tried to fill by installing some browser extension (opening up privacy issues) or using some third-party website: it simply pings any given website once a minute, and reports back a status code. If the site goes down or is inaccessible when Web Watcher checks, it’ll notify you. And it keeps a local log of each status check, so you can see response times and status codes over time.
I chatted with KJ about himself, Web Watcher, and AppCenter.
I’m a developer who loves to experiment with new things and try new ideas. I’m always trying to think of something useful or fun and come up with ways to implement it just to learn.
Outside of app development, KJ enjoys playing with his kids and playing games. He also works at a web development company, where they use a third-party service for doing the sort of monitoring that Web Watcher does. However, it wasn’t as frequent or detailed as he’d like; naturally, he wrote his own app and published to AppCenter in case it was useful for other people out there on elementary OS.
When it came time to publish, KJ was pretty pleased with the whole process.
My experience with development has been very good. Once I was able to get my application to the point where I could compile, everything went smoothly. The new automated testing with Houston helped me track down and resolve several issues before I submitted to the store.
If there’s one feature I’d love for Web Watcher, it would be the ability to monitor for content changes — imagine being able to use it to keep an eye on your favorite web-based store and get a notification when a new product is released. That’s one capability I still turn to a third-party website for, and being able to do that locally would be a boon to both privacy and reliability.
Still, Web Watcher is a handy utility for a freelance web developer, devops, or anyone wanting to keep their eye on the uptime of an important website. And it does so in a privacy-respecting way on your local machine.
Get Web Watcher
Web Watcher is available on AppCenter for the recommended price of just $3. As with all apps on AppCenter, its source code is also open and available on GitHub.
KJ also has a new app called Archetype available on AppCenter. It’s designed to help other app developers get off the ground quickly with all the boilerplate of a Vala app. Check it out!
Thank you to all of the app developers like KJ Lawrence out there, everyone who’s bought an app on like Web Watcher on AppCenter, our supporters on Bountysource and Patreon, and those who’ve purchased a copy of elementary OS or merch from our store.
Each and every of these contributions helps make elementary OS and AppCenter, and we wouldn’t be here without you.
