I was a bit bored the other day but managed to find something to do. Something reminded me of a guy I used to work with who used the phrase “It’s all gone tits up” a lot. He headed up the test team so he had reason to use it!

I don’t really know why but I decided to log in to my Gandi account and checked the availability of titsup.*, found that titsup.net was available and registered it.

The result of all this is that I’ve developed a simple website to check if a given URL is working. There are other sites that do this, mainly in response to Twitter downtime, but in an effort to differentiate TitsUp from those it has two features I couldn’t find anywhere else.

It can check a domain name like the others, but you can also enter a complete URL and it will check that. It follows all redirects until it reaches a destination and it also lets you know exactly what went wrong rather than just saying whether it’s working or not.

The other feature is only evident if the URL you check is not working. TitsUp will offer to check a failing URL every 10 minutes for the next 24 hours. If it starts working you’ll get an email telling you the good news. If it’s still not working after 24 hours you’ll get an email saying so. It can also optionally notify you in both cases via a direct message in Twitter thereby allowing you to get an SMS notification as well as an email. Note that for this to work you’ll need to follow the titsup user.

As a simple tool I think it works really well. I’m interested in any opinions people might have so please let me know what you think. Now all I need to do is create an icon for the site and Twitter user. Anyone fancy giving that a go?