"In 2009, no more support for Internet explorer 6", that's what we have decided many months ago. It means that we won't even check if the website is working with MSIE6, especially if it's a web application.

It is, of course, a symbolical decision, but there are some numbers behind it; here is the market share of browsers by versions in December 2008:

So take a look at this: All versions of Firefox + All versions of Safari = 17.18 + 3.77 + 3.39 + 3.28 = 27.62%

With Good Browsers' market share ever growing, and MSIE 6.0's ever shrinking, we think it's the right time.

Happy new year !

EDIT: Google also thinks it is the right time: Google tells users to drop IE6

A good news in this sad world !

Rails 2.2.2 has been released, which means easy internationalization for everyone !

We will conduct a small study to know... well... just who still has some money left in this world economic crisis, and do some translations in their languages.

EDIT: How to translate with a default scope

By the way, did I already mentioned that you should subscribe to Monitoria?
Yes?
Oh, okay. My bad.

... but it's improving.

Guess what I've found monitoring the homepages of TechCrunch and Twitter, with Monitoria... well see it for yourself:

You can also see that TechCrunch has been really slower to respond between the 7th and the 13th.

It came as a surprise to me, after an awful-lot-of-articles about Twitter downtime issues.

Hey Michael, I guess you plan to write a dozen articles about that problem, right ?

PS: You too, you can discover the uptime of your website with Monitoria Website Uptime Monitoring Service !

This is a big and exciting week for us: After releasing a new version of Kolibria's website and this blog, we are releasing our first real "Kolibria Web Application": Monitoria, a website uptime monitoring service.

It has been very useful for us, into helping to manage the availability of our clients servers so we decided to make it public. This is our fifth public Ruby on Rails website.

Why use this web application ?

I think you have to answer this simple question: How many clients did you lose last week, because your website was unavailable ?

If your website wasn't monitored at that time, the answer is probably "I don't know". That's not a good answer. You HAVE TO know.

And even if you think you know, are you in front of your computer every single minute of the day, to check if your website is up ? I don't think so. That's where Monitoria comes in.

Monitoria will perform an HTTP request every minute (or more if you want) on your website, and alert you via e-mail or SMS when it is down or too slow. A website is considered to be offline if your server answers an HTTP status other than 200, or if it fails to respond within 10 seconds. Another E-mail/SMS will be sent when your website is back online.

Okay, enough with the talk, why not try it for yourself ? Okay, only because it's you, use this coupon code when you'll register, and you will get a 20% discount on any account: blog20-64906. Quickly, it will only be available for seven days!

Here is the press release (click to download the pdf):

Here is a before/after (click to enlarge):

How's that ?