Simon 5 is coming soon!
Simon version 5 is currently in beta testing. It is a massive update, introducing a much-requested feature: syncing the Simon data between multiple Macs, plus a Simon Status service, a Link Checker filter, improved Find filter, iMessage and Speak Error notifiers, a new app icon, and much more.
Important: please note that Simon 5 requires a minimum of macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and will be a paid upgrade from Simon 4 after the beta. Purchasers since September 1, 2020 automatically get a version 5 license (that also works in previous versions).
Avoiding skewing site stats
Yes, monitoring a small image or text file would probably be the best solution.
Of course, on a popular site, the Simon checks probably wouldn't make that much of a dent, but on less frequently visited sites, it could well become significant.
The "Unique Visitors" should presumably count the Simon checks as one visitor. It'd use the IP address to differentiate, so Simon's checks would only count as multiple visitors when your ISP changes your IP.
Re: Avoiding skewing site stats
David wrote:
> Of course, on a popular site, the Simon checks probably wouldn't make
> that much of a dent, but on less frequently visited sites, it could well
> become significant.
That's what I was quietly mulling over. If Simon is checking every 15 minutes, that's almost 100 bogus page loads a day.
Per your suggestion, I'll switch to monitoring a small file. (I use the same 1-pixel GIF "shim" on all my sites, and it's in the same directory (/images) on each, so switching them all will be a piece of cake!)
Thanks for being there for us, David.
Jim
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Jim Kane
Rochester, NY
Of course, the downside with
Of course, the downside with checking a shim gif is that you'll fail to detect failures relating to web server sub-system issues. Typical example of this is an ASP.NET handler failure in IIS, or a mySQL DBConnect failure in PHP/Apache. And, depending on your web server config, you'll likely be serving the gif out of memory cache and that may miss other developing problems.
Best bet is to create a subdirectory with a small page that does a dummy transaction and invokes all the sub-systems required for your website. A simple one on a LAMP server would be a database select query and display.
Great thinking
Terrific analysis and suggestion -- thanks!