Today I’ve written this simple PHP script to alert me through Twitter whenever our company’s local server is down. The script is called by a cron every 5 mins in my central hosting. Without much babble, here goes the code (if you’re interested to know why I needed this, that’s at the bottom of the post):

<?php

// Specify the target URL in your server
$targetUrl  = 'http://YOUR_SERVER_URL';

// Specify what the response is from the server
$targetText = 'Hello from Daredevil';

// We will be using cURL for fetching the content
$ch = curl_init();

// Set the params
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $targetUrl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// Get the response
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Are things in right place ?
if ($response == $targetText) {
    die('Site is up and running!');
}

// Nope, so here are the sender's twitter info
$username = 'SENDER_TWITTER_USERNAME';
$password = 'SENDER_TWITTER_PASSWORD';

// Receiver's twitter username
$receiver = 'RECEIVER_TWITTER_USERNAME';

// Alert message to send
$message = 'Daredevil is not responding, please fix ASAP!';

// The Twitter API address (new direct message)
$url = 'http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.json';

// We will be using cURL for this
$ch = curl_init();

// Set the params
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "user=$receiver&amp;text=$message");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");

// Send the request
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Success or failure
if (!empty($response)) {
    echo 'Recipient has been notified.';
} else {
    echo 'No response from twitter.';
}

Why I needed this?

Recently we have setup a server at our office for committing work to a local SVN repository and have the QA test our work whenever they are ready. We also have a staging server where we do SVN update from this repo. Now, for the last few days, I’ve found the local server to be off due to a few reasons – but every time I realized this at night when I am back home and can’t do anything to turn it on. So I thought about this Twitter alert which is sent to my cell phone immediately when the server goes offline.

Btw, if Twitter doesn’t send SMS to your country, don’t worry. Check out the excellent service at Twe2 that I’ve been using for a couple days.

Cheers!

Today I facilitated this workshop on Freelancing, organized by BDjobs.com. The primary focus of the workshop was to introduce the concept of freelancing to the attendee’s as well as to provide them with a general hands-on path on how to start freelancing. The total workshop covered a variety of sections starting from freelancing overview, freelance site reviews, tips on building a professional profile, the bidding process, tips on successful bidding, client management techniques, payment pitfalls, payment methods, etc.

You can download the presentation file here in two formats: PDF and Powerpoint.

The full workshop description is provided below. If you’re interested in attending the next workshop on April, get in touch with BDjobs.com.

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