With oil now at $50 a barrel, you no longer hear Congress complaining about oil speculators. The irony is there's probably more real speculation going on today than there ever was back in June and July.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/money_latest/~4/hfkCIZeQgIA" height="1" width="1"/

Not too long ago, Twitter was constantly lambasted for its lack of reliability. Now, at least one developer is confident enough in the microblogging tool to launch a simple service that notifies users of website uptime/downtime via Twitter replies.

Ding It’s Up is about as simple a notification service as you can find. First, specify how you’d like to be notified (email, SMS, or Twitter). Then, enter your respective account information. From there, the site will send you a message when the site you want to monitor goes offline (or comes back online as the case may be). Conveniently, Ding It’s Up doesn’t require any separate account registration.

Typically, services like Ding It’s Up are used by webmasters who want to monitor their own sites, but increasingly, “uptime notification” is a useful feature for those that depend on services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Last year, a similar service called Monitwitter launched, but it (also, somewhat ironically) seems to have disappeared due to an expired domain registration. In any event, if one of your responsibilities includes keeping a website online, it’s probably best to subscribe to multiple notification services as a fail safe. For that, check out our list of 13 Free and Cheap Website Monitoring Services.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/9045?ns=guardianpageName=Comment+is+free%3A+Squires+and+steeplesch=Comment+is+freec3=The+Guardianc4=Christmas+%28Life+and+style%29%2CLife+and+stylec5=Not+commercially+useful%2CChristmasc6=Kathryn+Hughesc7=2008_12_01c8=1126677c9=articlec10=GUc11=Comment+is+freec12=blogc13=c14=Comment+is+freeh2=GU%2FComment+is+free%2Fblog%2FComment+is+free" width="1" height="1" //divpThere is nothing quite so potent as cheap Christmas cards. I don't mean charity cards, the sort that offer tasteful woodcuts, sharp contemporary graphics or well-done reproductions of old masters in return for your contribution to cerebral palsy or clean water. What I'm talking about are those cards that annually reshuffle a tiny repertoire of wayside inns, robins and snow-banked cottages, and then brazenly keep all the profits for themselves. The kind of cards, mostly found in large assortment boxes, that remain blithely confident that nothing says Christmas quite as instantly as the steeple of a country church smeared with some dandruffy glitter./ppWhat's striking is how all these favoured images hail from Britain's pre-industrial past. So you'll see cottages rather than suburban villas, pheasants instead of turkeys, coaching inns rather than railway stations. There may be squires and parsons and even a Regency buck, but you'll search in vain for a factory manager or his clerk. There could be some peasants, skating across a low, frozen pond, but nary a factory worker in sight. It's as if Christmas can only happen in a land known as Once Upon A Time. /ppThe irony is, of course, that nothing about Christmas is quite so modern as this custom of sending cards. In 1843, the busy public servant Henry Cole realised that he didn't have time to do the usual seasonal touching base with his vast social and professional network. So instead he commissioned an artist to knock up something suitable and then mailed it out to everyone in his address book. Sharp-eyed commentators couldn't help noticing that Cole was the man who had recently helped set up the penny post. What better advertisement for the system's reach and efficiency than an annual blizzard of envelopes arriving on the nation's doormat? /ppSo as far as conservative souls were concerned, this new custom of sending Christmas cards represented everything that was offputting about the modern industrial age. It substituted impersonal contact for face-to-face sociability. Instead of the personal letter or a firm handshake, there was a mean piece of pasteboard handed to you by a servant of the state. The cards themselves smacked of the tradesman's quarterly bill, and there was something intrusive and coy about the lisping hope that the recipient might enjoy "every health and happiness" over the next year. /ppNo wonder that it took about 30 years for the idea to catch on. For it was not until the 1870s that the nation got into the habit of exchanging illustrated bits of card each December with their entire social and professional network. No wonder, too, that after an early flirtation with a range of visual material, the Christmas card settled into endlessly circulated images of Britain from an earlier, pre-industrial age. It was as if the only way to offset the essential anomie of the Christmas card was to load it with images from a time when the bonds between people were organic and unforced. The wayside inn spoke of a habitual sociability between strangers; the partridge suggested a natural world that marched to its own seasonal rhythms; the village church stood for a community that honoured the hierarchical social bonds which Cole, with his tradesman's sensibilities, had cut across so crassly. /ppAnd yet the fact that all these steeples and game birds and hostelries remain so prominently in circulation suggests their continuing cultural punch. For if the images really had ceased to mean anything, they would surely have quietly disappeared long before now. Just perhaps, deep down, we recognise and value them as symbols of social and ecological continuity. With our own Christmases continuing to stir up sharp anxiety about what really matters - public partying or private family time, retail expenditure or authentic emotional exchange, supermarket food or artisanal produce - it looks as though we hanker after the certainty of Once Upon A Time more strongly than is quite comfortable to admit./ppa href="http://mailto:kathryn.hughes22@googlemail.com"kathryn.hughes22@googlemail.com/a/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/christmas"Christmas/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/_BquKfQM86ElfWKHdVf0Q8V1TFg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/_BquKfQM86ElfWKHdVf0Q8V1TFg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p