bitcoinmonitor.net will shutdown.I hope to have it running 2-3 more days, but circumstances are out my control. So right now there is nothing I can do about it, and it seems unlikely that it will be back up soon.
Original post from 2012-02-16:Ever since the ugly end of bitcoinnotify.com last december I was thinking about implementing a better notification service myself, including a secure, easy-to-use payment service. This idea kept bugging me, so over Christmas holidays i started working on it. Now, after many hours spent thinking, coding, learning and testing I think it's time for a public announcement!
http://www.bitcoinmonitor.netOf course I know there are other services already existing, but it seems many of them offer notifications as a kind of add-on to other stuff, not really focusing on providing a decent user experience. And in general it never hurts to have a choice - especially for the area of providing payment services I consider it absolutely necessary to have multiple choices which could even be used in parallel for added security/reliability.
Important:
The notification service will stay free for everybody. Of course i need to think about covering the costs for server and traffic, but this will not be done by charging the average user. One idea which might have potential is embedding advertisement into the notifications, or offering complete payment integration modules for the well-known shop systems - but this is not decided yet.
Major goals I had in mind when working on this site:
- Usability:
To make it easy also for non-techies to understand how the site works I introduced the concept of agents. Of course usability is a subjective matter, so if you have any improvement suggestions let me know. - Control:
Full notification history - You can track each and every single notification in your dashboard, including status e.g. on the response of http callback. API access is quite high on my TODO-list, which will make it possible to setup and manage your agents via json-based http API. Also a retry-strategy for failed notifications is clearly defined. - Speed:
The main point in providing payment notifications is to have them as fast as possible. So the whole architecure is event-driven - no polling anywhere. - Stability:
Use existing, rock-stable frameworks and tools whenever possible. This means: Mysql and django for the core, celery and rabbitmq for task handling, YAML css framework for the layout. Especially bitcoinmonitor.net does NOT require any additional tool/database/whatever to interact with the bitcoin network. It is just a stock bitcoind with small patches applied to trigger on new unconfirmed transactions/blocks and allow retrieving of arbitraty transaction information. - Scalability:
Direct benefit of using existing technology versus NIH-syndrome is scalability. If necessary each component can be moved to it's own hardware, made redundant or be load-balanced.
This is the initial public launch (well, few days ago I posted it on G+ ;-), so the site is still considered in betaphase and is not yet finished.
The layout and design is really just the default YAML template and definitely needs some beautification and improvements. The list of right now available notifications is rather short. Content and texts are probably rather clumsy. API access is only half-way done and not yet available to the public.
tl;dr:Please checkout
http://www.bitcoinmonitor.net and let me know what you think!
