Tonight George Starcher sent me an email to this article in TUAW telling us an easy way to add a badge to your web site to see if the Apple store is down or not. Here is an excerpt

Pingdom, purveyors of website monitoring services, have produced a badge that puts the status of the Apple Store on your web page, blog, and maybe your dashboard with a web clipping. Pingdom does the work of pinging the Apple Store once per minute to determine its current state, and provides you with an image indicating up or down which is embedded in an iFrame. Simple, but effective.

Well, sure enough I put the badge on the TMUP web site. I then took two more steps to make this even cooler.

One: I turned the badge into a web-clipping using Safari. I just used the URL below on Safari, then used the web-clip feature. Viola I had a widget that I can look at anytime.

http://applestorestatus.pingdom.com/?id=2

Here is the result

Two: I went to my iPhone and put the same URL into the iPhone.

http://applestorestatus.pingdom.com/?id=2.

I then zoomed in , and added it to my home screen. Here is that result.

So there you go. Now you can know anytime if the Apple Store is down.