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Have you considered setting up an api? If I used this, I'd worry that if I forget to respond to the emails or something. Letting me hook it into other events that indicate I'm alive, such as logging into my laptop, etc, would prevent this.

It'd really be a one-action api- send a post request to some url to keep me alive, with some level of authentication.




You can load any webpage on the site, and it will keep you alive. It's as simple as doing a POST on the form, but it should be trivial for me to implement a simple API, so I'll write this soon!

It will probably be something like:

    https://www.deadmansswitch.net/api/checkin/?username&password
However, GAE can't do https on that domain yet, and I don't feel very secure passing credentials like that, so I might have to issue API keys. Still, not very hard, thanks for the suggestion!


Easy. Instead of sending a username and password, generate a long key of some kind that would be unique to each user and use that instead.


Yep, that's what I meant by API key above. I could also home my Android skills by making a simple app for it.


How would that be any different, security wise?


It would not contain information used for login.




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