Most single serving websites are very gimmicky, like telling you you’re awesome, showing you how to spell “definitely”, or playing a fail sound. Some, however, are actually useful.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a single serving site is a one-page website with its own domain name that focuses on doing just ONE thing. These sites are by their very nature limited in scope, and that’s the whole point. They need to be dead simple to use, and most of the time they are just designed to answer a very specific question or perform a simple task.

Here are some of the more useful single serving websites we here at Pingdom have stumbled upon in our wanderings around the Web.

Stopwatch

URL: http://stopwat.ch/
What it does: Gives you an analogue and a digital stopwatch to play with (you can switch mode).

Egg Timer

URL: http://e.ggtimer.com/
What it does: Just as you might guess, it acts a virtual egg timer for you.

Down for everyone or just me?

URL: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
What it does: Tells you if a website is really down or if it’s just you having problems.

Is the Apple Store down?

URL: http://www.isapplestoredown.com/
What it does: A classic for Apple fans, this site just tells you if the Apple Store is up and running or not. (Since Apple tends to take it down when they are about to announce something new.)

Do I need an umbrella?

URL: http://doineedanumbrella.com/
What it does: Lets you know if the weather warrants an umbrella today.

Is it a leap year?

URL: http://isitaleapyear.com/
What it does: Tells you if it’s a leap year or not.

What week of the year is it?

URL: http://whatweekisit.com/
What it does: Shows you what week (number) and day of the year it is.

Feelings on Twitter

URL: http://tweetfeel.com/
What it does: Shows you the ratio between positive versus negative tweets on a subject.

What time is it there?

URL: http://whattimeisitthere.info/
What it does: Shows you what time it is in the various time zones across the US.

Did we miss your favorite single serving site? Let us know in the comments!

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The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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