Numbers for the RSS Monitoring Service

Last week I published a free tool to monitor the expiration of TLS certificates.

The UX is clunky. Users have to hand-type the URL pattern. There are no queries for customization. And still, more than 500 domains were added over the course of a few days. About half of them are monitored frequently via RSS.

I got a lot of constructive feedback and friendly comments on Hacker News and Lobsters. This showed me again what a great community we have in software development.

On a side note, I think the well known monitoring solutions are often too big for what self-hosters need. I imagine that’s why the RSS monitoring solution is so appealing to many. It solves a problem that self-hosters have without requiring the big monitoring and alerting solutions. There’s probably much to explore in the space of monitoring, alerting and self-hosting.