I’ve gotten a couple emails indicating that Blogspot Watch is showing that blogspot is up when it’s clearly down for maintenance, according to their web site.

I could in theory refine it to account for this, but it would both involve more sophisticated programming, and increase the bandwidth load from the checking, because right now it only looks at headers, rather than the full page. The latter is probably not a real concern, given the millions of hits that they get daily, but it was one of the considerations when I refined the original design, per the suggestion of one of their programmers.

Its basic purpose was only to determine whether or not the server was available, not whether or not all was going well on it. So when there’s a maintenance problem such as today’s (or whatever it is), it’s going to give a false positive. I’d like to do better, but as one emailer suggested, I don’t have time right now to increase the quantity of free ice cream.