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Awesome great news from citi:

1647 GMT [Dow Jones] CitiFx says the key result of the actions in Europe are that credit risks associated with holding the debt of the periphery of Europe are no longer what they were last week. " bottom line is that if you held Greek paper last week you were exposed to the risk of a Greek default. Now your exposure is to Europe, as that Greek paper is effectively backed by the other governments of the Eurozone," it says. "This is a major step towards getting to the heart of the problem in Europe...a single European bond market," Citi says. If successful, it will be a major part of strengthening EUR as a serious global reserve currency, it adds. (don.curren@dowjones.com)

By Neil Shah

In a sign that pressures in Europe’s troubled bond markets are easing, debt-laden Portugal successfully raised �1 billion ($1.27 billion) in cash from private markets on Wednesday.

Prices of euro-zone government bonds are also stable or slightly higher, with the cost of insuring against sovereign-debt defaults in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain falling and the euro advancing.

It’d be worrying if these bond prices weren’t rising � since the European Central Bank is now raising cash and buying them, supporting prices.

“The auction represented a very important test for Portugal and more in general, for the periphery. We would judge today’s result as positive overall,” analysts at UniCredit said in a note.

Investors should keep a close eye on upcoming bond sales by the U.K. and countries on Europe’s fringe.

Italy had to pay a slightly higher interest rate to raise cash on Tuesday, though that’s understandable given the tumult in markets. The U.K.’s debt managers also sold �2.25 billion in bonds Tuesday.

The next test comes Thursday, when the Italian government tries to sell a longer-term bond, though analysts expect demand to be solid.

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It’s time to say thanks to MakeUseOf’s friends who, once in a while, tip us great story ideas, help out on different projects and in some cases offer their services at discounted prices. Thank you, guys!

ShrinkTheWeb – Website Screenshot Thumbnail Service




Ever wanted to add website screenshots to your website? In my professional opinion ShrinkTheWeb is one of the best services for that, both in terms of performance and pricing. The free account gets you a whopping 250,000 impressions with nearly no delay. See it in action in our daily Cool Websites and Tools series.




Walyou – Cool Gadgets for Geeks




Walyou is a fun blog covering all sorts of new cool gadgets and other stuff every geek is likely to find entertaining. Everything from world’s largest Gunny Bears to E-hookah gadgets. Make sure to check them out.






PXLEyes – Photoshop Contests and Tutorials




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Pair – Reliable Web Hosting




Finding the right hosting provider is VERY important. Along with choosing the right domain name it’s the most important decision you have to make at the beginning. Here at MakeUseOf when someone asks for hosting advice we always recommend Pair. Speedy servers, excellent tech support, over 99.95% guaranteed uptime.

Thank you, guys!

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You can’t sit staring at your monitor 24 hours a day to keep an eye on your website(s), so thank the heavens for the free services out there that do it for you.

Whether site downtime means loss of revenue or just loss of face, or you need to stay a step ahead of your clients, these services offer you a completely free way of knowing what’s up, what’s down and in some cases, why.

Read on for our list of ten suggested solutions, but as this list is by no means exhaustive, please do share any services you favor in the comments.

1. UptimeRobot

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 50/> Regularity of Checks: Every 5 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS, RSS, Twitter coming soon

UptimeRobot looks at your site header’s status codes every five minutes and if the code comes back with a problem, does further checks. Then, if there are still issues, it lets you know about it pronto. Created by two devs who think the web should be free or cheap, it’s guaranteed a no-payment service until August 2010, so hop over now to check it out.

2. Pingdom

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1/> Regularity of Checks: User set, from 1 minute upwards/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS (up to 20 per month), push alerts via iPhone app

Pingdom is a big boy of the paid monitoring services market, but does offer a very basic free account. Although the free service only lets you monitor one site, we feel it’s particularly worthy of mention since it comes with a free iPhone app gives you a handy on-the-go solution for monitoring your website’s status.

3. Mon.itor.us

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1/> Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: IM, SMS, E-mail, RSS

Mon.itor.us is the free little sister service to Monitis and offers a simple set-up for its external monitoring. As well as alerts, the app tracks failures and logs a report of the uptime/downtime of your website per day, week or month and makes the reports available to you in real time.

4. InternetSeer

/> Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1/> Regularity of Checks: Every hour/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS, pager (!)

If sizes matters to you then you’ll be interested to note that InternetSeer claims to be the largest website monitoring service, currently working for over 1.7 million sites worldwide. While it’s been on the receiving end of some criticism for excessive email marketing, in addition to the ability to set up alerts to go to multiple contacts, the service generates a free weekly report.

5. Uptrends

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1/> Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: On-site info only

The free option from Uptrends is more suited to those who want to make uptime info readily available to their users, rather than an alert-based, service. Once you embed the button on your site, Uptrends monitors the uptime of your website every 30 minutes from worldwide checkpoints. Clicking the button will generate an uptime report of the last 24 hours, last 7 days, month and year.

6. BasicState

/> Number of Sites you can Monitor: Unlimited/> Regularity of Checks: Every 15 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, SMS

BasicState will check the status of unlimited websites for you every 15 minutes and alert you either via e-mail or SMS if there’s trouble afoot. There’s also the option to generate a daily uptime report with a 2-week history and the service can be tailored to add default, backup and emergency alert schedules to your preferences.

7. Montastic

Number of Sites you can Monitor: 3/> Regularity of Checks: Every 30 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, status via RSS and widgets for Macs and PCs

Montastic offers itself under the fabulous tagline of “the free website monitoring service that doesn’t suck.” The open source service checks from multiple locations in the U.S., so it might be best for sites that have an American audience. Tiered, paid-for options increase the amount of URLs you can get checked and reduce the time between checks.

8. Are My Sites Up?

/> Number of Sites you can Monitor: 5/> Regularity of Checks: 25 times a day/> Methods of Alerts:

The freebie option from Are My Sites Up? checks as many as five of your sites at least 25 times per day with unlimited email and SMS notifications that, in most cases, will help tell you why your site has gone offline by providing the HTML status error code. Paying up for the premium service opens up access to an iPhone app that is sadly not available for free accounts.

9. Site24×7

/> Number of Sites you can Monitor: 1/> Regularity of Checks: Once an hour/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail

The free service from Site24×7.com is basic, and offers monitoring of one URL every hour with e-mail alerts sent out in case disaster strikes. It’s just one of several free webmaster tools from the company that also includes an anytime website uptime check, web page load time analysis and various DNS/IP search tools.

10. 100Pulse

/> Number of Sites you can Monitor: 2/> Regularity of Checks: Every 15 minutes/> Methods of Alerts: E-mail, RSS and a Google gadget

Along with e-mail and an RSS feed, 100Pulse’s free website monitoring service will keep you updated on the status of two sites via a Google Gadget that you can add to your iGoogle homepage for an at-a-glance look at the status of your websites. As with almost all of the above, paying out gets you extra features, but the free service will cover you for the basics.

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