Oh Dear! is a new SaaS application for website monitoring with multi-location uptime monitoring, mixed content detection, and SSL certificate and transparency reporting, by Freek Van der Herten and Mattias Geniar. The application is built on top of Laravel Spark.

Over the past couple of weeks we've been optimising the Downtime Monkey website to reduce page load time. We've had some excellent results: in the best case scenario we cut page load time by 58% and even in the worst case, the page load was still 9% faster. All of the changes that were made are straightforward and we've provided in-depth details of the optimisations so that you can apply them to your own website.

Reports have recently surfaced about Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in most modern computer systems. These so-called side-channel attacks can allow one program (e.g. a browser) to infer and even read data used by the CPU to execute another program… even a more privileged one. These vulnerabilities affect phones, ​tablets, ​desktops, servers, and cloud computing services.

Happy New Year! We just shipped our January 2018 update and there’s a lot to be excited about. Mattermost 4.6 includes several web app performance improvements, including channels that switch faster than ever before. Plus faster loading of images, thanks to higher compression, and less memory used to manage channels, thanks to optimizations.

2018 has arrived, and many IT professionals likely are hard at work mapping out their incident management strategies for the new year. As IT professionals search for ways to limit downtime and outages in 2018, it may be best to understand which key trends are worth watching in the months to come.