This blog is hopefully going to explain some of the behind the scenes work involved in setting up PingAlive.

These first few entries will be retrospective in nature since i didn't really have time while i was doing the initial setup of the site.

To kick off here's some of my motivations in developing PingAlive...

Primarily it's a learning experience. I work as a VB developer writing bespoke Winforms applications and have also developed some DotNetNuke based online ordering solutions for particular clients. These are just business to business sites and so don't have any of the SEO issues that public sites have, and also don't have heaps of users.

I've been interested in learning a little about the SEO end of things and also would like to get a feel for the resource usage that more users brings with it, especially with DotNetNuke. Plus, it's handy to have an uptime monitoring tool / keepalive program for the previously mentioned clients sites.

PingAlive was an idea I'd been mulling over for a few months. Simple, concise, and hopefully of use to folks out there. So i decided to take the plunge and develop this site. It's been created in my spare time over the past few weeks but is shaping up nicely. I've already made a few mistakes and had to retread my steps but it's all part of the journey.