OnlineOrNot Diaries 1

Alright, I've poured myself a beer, it's early Friday evening, let's quickly dig into how OnlineOrNot went this week.

Coding Week, Marketing Week tells me it's marketing week, I've spent at least half of this week building the onlineornot CLI, but it wasn't a total loss.

(I'm starting a thing where I write about OnlineOrNot regularly in a barely edited, diary-like format, let me know what you think.)

Actual marketing

Today is OnlineOrNot's second birthday (roughly - I published a tweet about it on the 25th of February 2020, but published the day before), and to celebrate, I wrote up what I learned running a SaaS for a second year.

Approximately 1.6k people read it this week, about 1/20th the number of readers for the article from last year, but whatever.

I published a second article about the thinkpad I built last weekend, which was read by 45k people this week, and drove 1.2k people to OnlineOrNot's home page, which is wild.

It led to a few folks to message me that the machine I built for myself doesn't work for them and their use case, which gave me a good chuckle.

OnlineOrNot CLI

The other day, I realized what annoys me most about OnlineOrNot is that I have to open a browser, type into the address bar, and navigate through the landing page and the app's home page before I can see how my checks are doing.

It got me thinking, it'd be cool if onlineornot checks list was just a command in your terminal.

In three days, I've made it possible. npm install -g onlineornot if you want a global command, or npx onlineornot@latest to just run the latest version every time (requires at least Node 16 LTS).

You can find the source code on GitHub.

This week I shipped commands to:

• Get a list of all uptime checks in an account, and their live status (with JSON output support too)
• Get a specific uptime check, and it's live status (with JSON output support too)
• Delete a specific uptime check
• Open a browser window to the docs
• Open a browser window to the billing settings
• Open a browser window to the developer settings

I'm pretty chuffed, the CLI menu looks like this at the moment:

// npx onlineornot@latest
onlineornot

Commands:
  onlineornot docs     📚 Open OnlineOrNot's docs in your browser
  onlineornot checks   ✅ Manage your uptime checks
  onlineornot billing  🧾 Open OnlineOrNot's billing in your browser
  onlineornot login    🔓 Opens your browser to OnlineOrNot's Developer settings
  onlineornot whoami   🕵️  Retrieve your user info and test your auth config

Flags:
  -h, --help     Show help  [boolean]
  -v, --version  Show version number  [boolean]

Over this weekend I'll make it possible to add uptime checks too, probably via onlineornot checks create, and release it as the v1.0 release.