If you host or manage or are responsible for a web site the number one thing you have to know is …   Are my sites up?  A service at AreMySitesUp.com handles this issue in a seamless and easy to manage way.  So whether you are responsible for 5 sites or 100 sites, you can know within minutes if any of your sites are down and begin working to correct the problem – even before it is ever reported to you.

AreMySitesUp.com provides both FREE and paid service.  The free service is great.  It allows you to monitor up to 5 sites and receive email or SMS when any of the sites go down.  It checks the sites about once an hour at this level.  Not bad if you are running less than critical sites.  For more important sites or if you monitor a lot of sites, you may want to check out their paid service.  For $75 a  year, you can monitor up to 100 sites with checks every 15 minutes.  All the premium services check the sites’ status with greater frequency, provide RSS feed instant checks and are advertisement free when you visit the web site.

Other features include, iphone/itouch application, twitter integration (really not sure what this looks like or why anyone would care), and reports of time a site was down and when it came back up.

All and all a good service.  The free service takes care of most our needs, but the paid service provide a little extra speed and the ability to monitor a lot more sites.  For more information, visit http://bit.ly/17FBiu.

Google updated their image search feature today so that you can search for images with Creative Commons or GNU Licenses that you can use for FREE. All these pics are tagged as being usable by anyone. You can even search for images that you may be allowed to modify.

To use this feature, visit http://images.google.com and go to Advanced Image Search. Then select the type of license that you are interested under “Usage Rights.”

LEGAL WARNING: Keep in mind that the person who tagged them might not actually have the rights to the image. So be careful. You may have the rights to the artists creation, but not to the unrestricted use of the building or model. So this search is probably fine if you are looking for a picture of a flower or animal, but if there is a person or a building in the pic, you still may want to use one of the stock photo sites out there.

For more information on this service, visit http://bit.ly/v2WnL.

Here’s a great list of plugins blogged by @EricHamm.

SEO, Anti-Spam, Comments, etc: The Best Wordpress Plugins

Good find on twitter. RT: @Photoshop_GU: #Photoshop : Red and brown grunge backgrounds: Red and brown grunge backgrounds, dirty colored paper.. http://tr.im/rhya

10 beautiful free wood textures for your designs by PSDVibe.com.

Good article shared on Twitter. @chadengle RT @Minervity: Design With Consistency – http://bit.ly/EzhBY

This is a cool tool I came across.

Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

http://www.inkscape.org/

Looking for a nice slideshow script. I’m using this on one of my sites and it works great. Very easy to setup.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex14/fadeinslideshow.htm

Get inspired with CSS Nature.

http://www.cssnature.org/

Here’s a useful find from @speckyboy.

40 Free and Essential Web Design and Development Books from Google