In last week’s post to celebrate our 7th anniversary, we mentioned that our main aim for 2019 is to achieve feature parity between Joomla and WordPress. This week we’re taking a big step towards meeting that goal by providing updates for commercial WordPress plugins. Watchful can currently update any plugin or theme that’s listed on…

When you’re building a company, nothing comes quickly or easily. Seven years ago this week, we launched Watchful. Watchful was built on top of an existing extension called jMonitoring that dates back to 2009, so this project has been going for a decade now. I’m deeply grateful to all our customers and team members. Watchful’s…

The primary purpose of Watchful is to save you time. Organization of your website plays a big part in achieving this goal. The ability to tag your websites provides a flexible way for Watchers to organize their mainteance workflows. And since Tags can be added and managed easily, we see a lot of creativity from our users in…

For many years, private sites — those protected with basic authentication, a.k.a. htpasswd — could be managed in Watchful by simply embedding the basic authentication credentials in the site and administrator url fields. For example: user:password @ domain.com However, this did not allow uptime monitoring of protected sites. As a result, we baked in support for collecting the basic…

When we rolled out initial support for basic authentication last month, we noted that an update to the Edit Site interface was upcoming. This update was needed to accommodate the increased amount of information that we are using for each Joomla or WordPress site in your dashboard.  Today we can report that the update is complete. As you can see below, the screen has been…

Version 1.0.4 of the WordPress client has been released along with an update to the Watchful Dashboard. The updates include: Adoption of WordPress coding standards A fix for a bug in site audits Removal of the Beta flag in the SEO Audit  Users can update their sites to the latest WordPress client directly from the Watchful dashboard. 

While there are many levels of sophistication when it comes to developing websites, most web developers are familiar with the use of production sites and stagingsites. Production sites are the public-facing versions of your website that are used every day by site visitors. Staging sites are private clones of your production sites. They are used primarily by developers to test…

Today we are excited to announce that we have officially begun to migrate our website update and monitoring service to the watchful.net domain. Our original domain name watchful.li will be phased out. Since launching in 2012, Watchful has had a complicated relationship with its domain name watchful.li.  As we have explained to many folks at conferences and online, the idea of the .li…

Watchful will have a planned outage on May 9, 2019 in order to upgrade our database infrastructure. We expect the maintenance period to last no more than three hours. It is scheduled to begin at 11:00 UTC (6:00 AM Chicago, USA). During the maintenance period, a snapshot of all your website data and logs will be taken and…

Watchul is pleased to annunce that Francesco Abeni will be joining the development team at Watchful as interim Chief Technology Officer. Francesco is one of the original members of the Watchful development team and is well-suited to expanding the feature set and modernizing the code base. Francesco replaces Pierre-Andre Vullioud as CTO who, along with David Pizzotti,…