There are quite a few online companies that offer to monitor your website and alert you when it becomes inaccessible from different places around the globe. They send you email and SMS messages along with reporting features. And there are a few good ones that offer this service in a limited function for free.

If you need this, you’re probably doing it wrong. But if you really must check to see if a variable has been assigned yet, there’s nothing really stopping you. Here’s one way of implementing it.

I hate age the Month, Day, Year age verification on websites. Some kid is going to see that and enter their real age? Seriously? That’s more of an IQ check. And for you guys collecting the stats on how many people you turn away, you might want to think about how many people may have accidentally mistyped the year. Congratulations, you just turned away another customer.

If you check the contents of a post variable that never got passed, you get warnings. If you like keeping your verbosity set that high and want to avoid this warning, or you just want to avoid checking against a non-existent variable, try this

You might want to do this to make sure a set of configuration files don’t get changed, or to figure out which files get changed when you build that random source code as root! (note to self: don’t make as root unless you have to, rpmbuild is bad enough!)

If you just go to http://www.mailinator.com and type in an address so you can check its mailbox, you’ll notice there’s a limit on the number of characters you can use. I like using this service to vent my frustration with stupid services that require hoop jumping.