Motive

This is another meta post on the building blocks of this website. It’s a simple, statically rendered webpage, hosted on GitHub servers, with only one developer making changes every once in a while. The page shouldn’t really go down. But still, I want to know if it happens.

Stack

For this I’m using a really simple stack: Zapier + healthchecks.io. Both free tools and easy to setup. This whole thing takes literally 5 minutes to make.

Implementation

1. In healthchecks.io create a new check
   1. Schedule: Period 1 hour, grace time 1 hour
   2. Notification methods: Telegram (or email or whatever you prefer)
2. In Zapier create a two step Zap.
   1. Every Hour in Schedule by Zapier
   2. Run Python Code by Zapier

         import requests
      
         def check_website_status(url):
             try:
                 response = requests.get(url)
                 return response.status_code == 200
             except requests.exceptions.RequestException:
                 return False
      
         my_website = 'https://tgislason.xyz'
         health_check = 'https://hc-ping.com/<your healthchecks.io key>'
      
         is_up = check_website_status(my_website)
         if is_up:
             check_website_status(health_check)
      

3. Done, that’s it!

Image: Zapier automation

Image: healthchecks.io events