Use Jott to Check Site Status While Traveling

Most businesses rely pretty heavily on their Web sites, especially if that site sells products or services. A new service called UpTimeVoice lets you check the status of your site via your cell phone -- and its secret weapon is Jott. As regular Business Hacks readers know, Jott is the impossibly handy mobile-message service that transcribes voice messages and turns them into e-mails. With a little bit of setup (described in clear detail on the UpTimeVoice site), you can dial the Jott number as usual, say "UpTime," and then spell out the domain name of the site you want to check. (You can also create one-word shortcuts so you don't have to spell.) UpTimeVoice will check the site's availability and then send a status message via SMS and/or e-mail.

Now, arguably you could just use your phone's browser to visit the site directly and make sure it's working. But this gives you a fast, hands-free way to perform a check, which could come in handy for harried site administrators.

In case you missed it, we recently posted about using Jott to add events to your Google Calendar. This service is getting more useful -- and popular -- by the minute. I'll be very surprised if AOL, Yahoo, Google, or some other big company doesn't snap it up, and soon.