DotNeil.com

http://Notipal.com is the email collection & notification tool for your website error pages.

Copy/paste a line of code in to your error page template, and when your site throws an error page, you’re notified immediately, and your visitors get the option of leaving their email address for a follow-up notification when errors (those they specifically encountered) have been fixed. You could look at Notipal as an administration interface that wraps-up the all errors that occur on your website and creates a communication channel for keeping in touch with the visitors inconvenienced by each error.

You can try it for free, and it’s very easy to install (as easy as Google Analytics):

The service has been up in testing among web industry friends & contacts, and it’s time to reach out a little further and to have Notipal catching, collecting, and making errors a little less painful on your website and - if you’re a professional designer/developer/agency - your clients websites, too:

How did the idea come about? My Dad was trying to get on his online banking, and I was observing the process. But here’s the rub; the site was throwing a 500 error, “Internal Server Error”, on an un-styled error page.

After numerous cycles through the ‘right-click / refresh’ process in an attempt to access the site, I declared this to be tedious. Why wasn’t the page styled with corporate colours and logos, and why wasn’t there a form that read, “Enter your email address and we’ll notify you when we’ve fixed the problem”? That’s where the idea for Notipal came from - a pain point as a website visitor who just wanted to be told when something was fixed, rather than being left in the lurch to “Please try again later” (Thanks. When?).

But Notipal isn’t just for 500 pages - it can help with broken links, too. Let’s say you’re running an ecommerce store with a broken link which should be pointing to a product page; with Notipal installed, you’ll find out about the “Page Not Found” and get a chance to bring the potential customers back, direct them to the correct product page, and avoid losing the sale to a competitor.

Actually, there’s many more Notipal use-cases planned for development on the product roadmap.

Notipal is a Ruby on Rails app. It uses Shoulda for testing, Starling/Workling for asnyc processes, daemons for repetitive background jobs, and MySQL for the DB. It’s hosted on SliceHost (I’m really happy with these guys - they’re a great, low cost alternative to some of the more service-orientated Rails specific hosts). On that note; SoIndustry is using Notipal whilst it’s being transitioned to SliceHost (it’ll be back soon with lots of improvements).

I’m all ears for your thoughts & suggestions; is Notipal something that you’ll be installing on your website?