A year or so ago I did some research and testing of the variety of website uptime monitoring services out there. Sure any half-decent host does this as well, but sometimes a server only goes down externally and sometimes it doesn’t trigger their monitors. I also did this because I wanted to get a clear picture of just how much downtime a site might have.

Sites do go down, even if just for schedule maintenance. I wanted to see just how reliable my hosts were. Some of my hosting is supposed to be much more reliable than other hosts, and I wanted to see if I was getting what I was paying for.

When searching the first thing I realized were most all of the free or free trial offers were limited to the point of being useless. The next thing I noticed was that the paid options seemed rather expensive.

But then I came across Uptime Robot. They provided monitoring up to 50 sites – for free. They offer a number of configuration options, as well as uptime checking every five minutes which is much better than the 10-30 minutes other services offer. (I mean, really. If a service is only going to check every 30 minutes, that’s pretty much worthless. I’m going to have received a call by then.)

I’ve exchanged some emails with Uptime Robot. They helped me discover a problem with one host’s email, and they also implemented a feature I requested. They’ve been monitoring away on about a dozen sites of mine for about a year now, and they’ve done a very good job at it.

For a long time people would send Microsoft .doc files to users assuming the recipient could open the .doc file. Fast-forward ~15 years and that habit never went away, but technology adapted and many tools were created or modified to be able to open those Word Documents.

Of course, this problem repeated itself a few years ago when MS released it’s docx format. Sure it was supposed to be “open” but as many have pointed out, even MS didn’t follow their own standard. Not only that but the tools they released were flaky if not flat-out dysfunctional.

Apple has created a similar incompatibility with their Pages application. While you can “save as” a Word Document, if you make a change and hit save, it again saves it as a Pages document. Not only that, but without Pages nothing on a Mac (or PC) can even open the document.

The common “solution” suggested is to tell the user who sent you the file that they suck should send you the file as a PDF (or Save As… a .doc.) But they already have…

The Solution

1. Take the .pages file and change the file extension to .zip – so if it was Document.pages rename it to Document.zip
2. Now extract the file. On a Mac or in Windows, double-clicking the file should start the process
3. Next, in the newly extracted folder (directory) locate the QuickLook directory and you will find Preview.pdf

With this PDF, you can open the doc and copy and paste the content into something more useful.