Yeah, we know, Apple is the hot thing right now and WWDC is the party you want to go to. But tickets to WWDC sold out in 8 days in 2010 and in less than 12 hours in 2011. Obviously, it’s critical that you get online just as soon as Apple has released the tickets.
That’s where Pingdom monitoring comes in, and here’s how you do it.
WWDC sells out fast
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) runs for a few days every year and developers from around the world flock to San Francisco to learn all about developing for Apple’s platforms. Typically, Apple also makes some major announcements about new products and services during WWDC.
But since tickets sell out so fast you need to be quick if you want to get in to WWDC. Apple sells the tickets online at the WWDC site: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc.
Last year, some of the $1,600 tickets (normal price) were available on eBay and Craigslist for up to $5,000.
Ouch! You’ll want to avoid that.
What we’ll monitor
We got the idea for this from Marco Arment, creator of the amazing InstaPaper. He tweeted:
Added a Pingdom check to maximally alert me whenever developer.apple.com/wwdc/ does not contain “Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2011”.
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) March 27, 2012
We’ll show you how to set this up, like what Marco has done, with one change.
The test we create will look for the text “Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2011” on the page (it’s actually the title of the page). When Apple changes it to 2012, the monitoring system will alert us about the change.
Then, presumably, the tickets are available and we can go to the site and buy them.
This is obviously not a foolproof way of getting a notice when WWDC tickets go on sale. But after checking past year’s WWDC sites with Archive.org, it would seem the method will work well enough. An alternative could be to monitor http://developer.apple.com/products/wwdc/ instead.
Set up the monitoring
Here’s what you do:
- First, you need a Pingdom account. Since we offer free accounts, you don’t even have to spend any money on this. Just head over to Pingdom.com and click on “Free Signup”.
- Once logged in to your account you want to create a new check.
- Give the check a name. Something like “WWDC tickets” would work.
- Pick a check resolution of 1 minute.
- Under “Required settings”, select https and enter “developer.apple.com/wwdc/”.
- Under “Optional settings”, first select “Check for string on page”.
- In the text box, enter “Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2011”.
- Then under “Notification”, select how you want to get notified in case the test (check) fails. The test will fail when the “Apple Worldwide…” string is not encountered, presumably when Apple has updated the page with information about the 2012 event.
- Before saving the check you may want to click on “Test check” to see if everything works.
- Finally, click on “Add check” to save it and start the monitoring.
Good luck!
If you got this set up, all we can do is wish you good luck and have a great time at WWDC (if you get tickets).
Also remember, that even if you get the alert early, so you’re in with a good chance of getting the tickets, you also have to hope Apple’s servers will keep up with the onslaught of eager ticket buyers that is undoubtedly coming its ways.
Now, what else could you monitor using the same method?
Top picture courtesy of Ben Miller.
