Just last week we had the great pleasure of welcoming a new developer to Pingdom, and now it’s time for another one.

Filip Salomonsson has become one of us in the Pingdom team, bringing his considerable skills in coding, linguistics, and many other areas, to an already very diverse, creative, and dynamic group of kickass devs.

Growing up in Boden, in the north of Sweden, Filip started programming at an early age on a Commodore 128, and by the time he turned 16, he was running his on web development company.

That interest in programming and language brought him to studies in computational linguistics at Uppsala University, which fit him hand in glove.

“I’ve always been a nerd, always interested in language – how it works, how you build up sentences – so it was a natural choice,” he said.

The studies then led to Filip taking up a position as a teacher at the university, and later also as a programmer in a research project. His role then focused on developing various discrete modules, which converted data from one format to another. As that project was wrapping up, Filip was ready to look for new challenges.

Filip has now joined our ongoing quest to bring new services to market, but also to evolve the uptime and monitoring business. Besides his almost magical skills in coding, Filip will also work on various aspects of Pingdom’s systems, including design, testing, and more.

As a complement to his busy tech career, Filip enjoys physical activities, like climbing. He said he tends to focus on one form of exercise or physical activity at a time, to really master it, and then move on to something else.

Want to join our team?

Even as Filip is settling in at his new position at Pingdom, there’s still room for many more super geeky, talented and fun people in our team.

In other words, if you’re looking for new challenges, Pingdom might be the place for you!

If you would want to join us on this exciting journey, you could be working with us as we accomplish our mission of making uptime and performance monitoring even easier and more available to the entire world.

Besides, you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

To find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish, as you might imagine.

Today, Pingdom is proud to announce that we’ve added another great talent to our already amazing lineup of developers. Erik Trangärd will use his skills and experience with JavaScript, Rest, PHP and more, as a frontend developer, to enable Pingdom to bring you even more cool features and functionality.

Erik is actually born and raised in the same town as Pingdom’s HQ, which is Västerås, Sweden. He showed very early that he was indeed born to hack when he all but ripped his Amiga 500 apart to find out how it worked.

When the Internet started getting popular, Erik discovered the web. Building websites – from design to coding – captured his interest, and he decided that he needed to learn more about programming. Being a true geek, Erik studied a range of subjects in college, starting with computer science and continuing with game development.

Erik’s job at Pingdom will challenge his skills and experience from various areas, although it’s the coding that will take center stage. That fits him well, because Erik views the creative process in programming as a form of art. “It’s the creative element that attracts me to writing code,” he said. Then he adds that programming is just a tool to create a good design and experience for users.

Erik has spent the last few years working with developing a business system. But as he was looking for a change and new challenges, he got in touch with Pingdom, and one thing led to another.

Besides coding, Erik enjoys sailing, preferably in his own boat. He says he likes the feeling of disconnecting from everything and just enjoying the moment.

We’re still looking for more people

Even as Erik is getting into his new position as Frontend Dev at Pingdom, we’re still looking for more super geeky, talented, and fun coworkers to join our growing team.

If you want to join our team, you could be a key component in accomplishing our mission of making uptime and performance monitoring even easier and more available to the entire world. Besides, you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

If you would like to find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish, as you might imagine.

If you follow Royal Pingdom, you know we love cool and geeky stuff, like what’s happening with the Internet, web, performance, gadgets, and more.

Do you think you could contribute one or more articles to the Royal Pingdom blog?

We’re looking for top-notch quality content that is informative, analytical, engaging, funny, inquisitive, and, of course, of interest to our readers.

If you think you’ve got what it takes, send us an email, with some details about yourself, and what you’d like to write about.

If we feel that you could be a match for what we’re looking for, we’ll be in touch.

To get ahead of the question of whether we accept guest posts from companies writing about their services, we can simply say we’re not against it per se. But it better be of interest to our readership, and it should not be just a sales pitch for your stuff.

We’ll post this to Royal Pingdom as well.

Technorati’s Top 100 blogs is a great list, which we often use for various articles. It’s also a great place for you to find new blogs and other sites to follow, for all kinds of topics.

Now we have a new public service to announce – we’re monitoring the uptime of all the sites in the Technorati Top 100.

Since last week we publish the uptime of the Technorati Top 100 in a public uptime report. It’s easy to remember too: png.dm/ttop100.

Updated every 24 hours

Technorati updates the Top 100 list every 24 hours, so we do the same. That means that we add any sites that Technorati has added, and remove sites that have fallen off the list.

However, our monitoring goes on continuously, so the public monitoring page is always up to the minute.

But, even if a site has fallen off the list, that doesn’t mean we stop monitoring it. So if a site falls off the list and later reappears, the full monitoring history is available for you to look at.

We hope you will enjoy this public monitoring list. Perhaps, next time your favorite blog site is down, you can take a look at it and see what’s going on.

We already have some projects in mind, and new ones are popping up all the time, so we need a creative and reliable team that we can call on in times of need.

Perhaps you’ll be one of the chosen few?

We are first and foremost in need of kickass coders, experts at things like PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL. But we’ll also be in need of designers, like people who know Photoshop, Illustrator, CSS, HTML, etc.

We don’t really care where you are in the world – we can work remotely with you using Skype and other tools.

What we do require though is an excellence in the quality of the work accomplished, dedication to your craft, and, above all, that you were born to hack.

If we do one or two projects together, and both parties are happy, we’ll probably look at establishing a more permanent relationship between us.

So, go ahead, email us at freelance@pingdom.com!

Send your name, short introduction to yourself, and a link to where we can see your best work.

If we feel that we might be a match, we’ll be in touch.

Pingdom would like to take this opportunity to introduce the latest addition to our geeky team. Anders Ekman has joined us as support technician.

Anders comes from Sala, a town not far from the Pingdom HQ in Västerås, Sweden. His older brother got him inspired and curious about computers at an early age, and he wanted to figure out what goes on inside the box, how it all works.

In high school Anders specialized in IT, which was the perfect choice for him, he says. But after school he wanted to see the world, and looked for IT-related jobs all over the place.

He ended up in Ireland, doing support for a large international tech company. After six months in Ireland, Anders felt that he had experienced most of what the job and the place had to offer and he headed back to Sweden, and now Pingdom.

At Pingdom, Anders will be working as a support technician, very much drawing upon his experience from Ireland. His days will be filled with answering emails, taking phone calls, and overall sorting out any issues, which Pingdom customers may experience.

In between the support calls and emails, Anders will go hunting for some good Mexican food. That’s one of the few things he says he’ll miss from Ireland.

We still have open positions

So today we’re welcoming Anders to Pingdom, where he’ll dig right in to his support duties. But even though Anders just joined Pingdom we’re still looking for more super geeky and fun coworkers to join our growing team.

You could be a key component in accomplishing our mission of making uptime and performance monitoring even easier and more available to the entire world. Besides, you will have a choice of what crazy maxed out and packed computer you want to run – Linux, Mac, or Windows.

If you would like to find out more about the positions available, head over to our career site for all the details. It’s in Swedish, as you might imagine.

If you have an interest in web performance in general, if you build or maintain sites and web infrastructure, this is the event for you.

It’s online and registration is free.

Steve Souders, web performance guru at Google and Velocity Online Conference Chair, will give the opening remarks, setting the stage for the event.

Then you get to listen to companies like Akamai, Google, and Olark, giving presentations on a wide range of topics. You will hear the experts talk about “Don’t break the internet with your JavaScript”, “SPDY and HTTP/2.0″, and more.

We at Pingdom will of course take part in Velocity Online and look forward to all the interesting talks.

Chat with us on IRC

Just in time for Velocity Online we’ve got our very own Pingdom IRC network set up. You can join us there during the event to chat about the presentations, give your input on what the experts say, or just hang out and chat about web performance.

The server is irc.pingdom.com (of course!) and we’ve created a chat room called #velocityonline just for the occasion.

We have more plans and announcements coming about IRC, so stay tuned.

Wait, there’s more

Also, we wanted to add that you should definitely check out our series of interviews about web performance. The first one, with Jeremey Keith of Clearleft, was published last week.

Making sure that as many people as possible are running the most recent version of their web browser of choice is a Good Thing ™ for so many reasons. Security is one. Performance is another. Compliance to web standards is another (a biggie).

We here at Pingdom want to make sure that as many people as possible run the latest web browser. This means happier web designers and developers, which in turn benefits end users. Full circle.

With that in mind, we want to make sure that we reward you if you run the latest version of your browser. Think of it as our little contribution to the promotion of web standards.

Update: Campaign has now ended as we’ve reached the number of free accounts we’re giving away. Thanks for taking part and congratulations to those who managed to get a free Basic or Business account.

Update your browser, get a free Pingdom account

If you have a website, listen up!

From now until Tuesday next week (April 10), we have an Easter Egg planted on the Pingdom homepage. Here’s the skinny:

If you’re using the latest version of your web browser, you get 100% off a Pingdom account. Yep, a full account for free.

All you have to do is visit Pingdom.com, and follow the instructions.

The full yearly price for a Pingdom Basic account is normally $120, and a Business account is $480. This is an excellent opportunity to save some bucks.

The discount code you’ll get also works for upgrading existing Pingdom accounts.

What you get from Pingdom

Just in case you’re not familiar with what we do…

With Pingdom you’ll be the first to know when your website is down. The faster you know about it, the faster you can fix it, and we test your site every minute, 24/7.

We make website monitoring easy. There is nothing you have to install. Everything is handled by Pingdom’s servers, so just create an account, log in, and quickly set up monitoring. That’s it. You’ll be up and running in 5 minutes.

A few features of the Pingdom service:

• Monitor uptime and response time of websites, servers, mail servers, etc.
• Get alerts via email, SMS, Twitter or Pingdom’s mobile app (see below). You can have as many contacts as you like.
• Android and iPhone app: View your status on the go, and get alerts.
• Plenty of troubleshooting help for downtime.
• Plenty of reports to help you see uptime and performance trends.
• Like transparency? Just activate your own public status page. We host is for you.
• And much more.

Oh, and you get free support. No canned cut-and-paste replies, you get to talk to real people here at Pingdom.

How the discount works: The discount applies the first invoice of a Pingdom Basic yearly account, which lets you monitor up to 5 websites or servers, or a Pingdom Business Account, which lets you monitor up to 30 websites or servers. Once that year comes to an end, you can choose to continue using Pingdom, or not. We’ll give you a heads up in good time. The discount is limited to the first 1,000 uses and to 1 use per person or company.

One such improvement is to register and become a LIR or Local Internet Registry, something pretty special. In fact, there are only 469 Local Internet Registries offering service in Sweden, where we at Pingdom operate from.

Let us explain what this means and how it will help us provide an even better service to our customers.

Benefits of being a LIR

Although there are many benefits for Pingdom to be a LIR, here are the most important ones:

• Our systems can now talk to a number of other Internet Service Providers using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). If, for example, one ISP our system is connected to experiences some problems, we can automatically and transparently route our traffic through another one. This is called multihoming, and it makes our already redundant systems even more fault tolerant.
• In a similar way, we can use the same IP addresses in a number of locations using anycast. This means that with multiple data centers, traffic always goes to the nearest data center. So, in the unlikely event of one data center becoming unavailable, because of fire, power outage, or other reason, another data center can immediately and transparently take over, using the same IP addresses.
• As a LIR, we also get control over a certain number of blocks of IP addresses. That means that we have our own IP addresses, and for those addresses, Pingdom appears as the Internet Service Provider. In practice, this gives us the ability to move networking equipment around more efficiently and without any effect on operations.

Pingdom continues to expand

Becoming a LIR, and putting the necessary hardware, software, and network equipment in place to support it, is just one step for Pingdom in the ongoing process of  upgrading our infrastructure.

In fact, during 2012 we will continue our work from 2011, to replace all our existing infrastructure. We’re excited about the year ahead and the opportunities that being a LIR offers us.

Picture via Shutterstock.

It is, of course, completely free!

With the app installed in your Chrome browser, you get easy access to your Pingdom account from Chrome’s Apps page. Chrome accounted for just over 40% of the traffic to Pingdom.com over the last 30 days, so we hope you will find this interesting and useful.

As is also explained in the details of the app, the app is connected to http://my.pingdom.com, which is our new control panel currently in beta. Since it’s still in beta, this means that some functionality is currently not available. You can however log in to our old control panel at http://pp.pingdom.com to access all functionality.

You can find the app in the Google Chrome Web Store.

Once installed you will find it among all the other apps you’ve installed in your Chrome browser, and it might look something like this:

We welcome your feedback about this app as well as all our services. You can leave comments in the Google Chrome Web Store, here on the site in the comments below, or on Twitter.