giffgaff – Service Status

For giffgaff I produced their first version of the giffgaff service status service. This grew out from the “Ideas Board” where people wanted an easy way to see if the service was having issues currently or not.

At the time giffgaff were having a few technical issues which had impacted myself, so I offered to help out and build a status page in MySQL and PHP. This was before cloud solutions such as StatusPage.io were an option.

This system was mostly used from the forum which could only be configured to pull in external images, so an iframe was not possible for this system. The images were generated on demand if a cached version was not already available. This allowed quick changes to configuration and the number of services available. The colours of the images changed to reflect if an active service issue was created against that service.

The system included an issue page which included a similar version of the status icons including a in-depth view of any issues including a latest update on the issue. This would allow members to quickly and easily find out what was going on instead of trawling through a long service update thread and staff having to constantly update a single message on a thread.

The user interface was designed to be incredibly simple using basic HTML elements and a small amount of CSS used to create cards, as being the popular UI trend at the time (with Google Assistant recently taking popularity).

Authentication to the system was with a basic username and password as integration with the central giffgaff login system was not possible although this would have improved the system.

The system proved to be useful, although was discontinued when a more professional solution took it’s place from their main network (O2) which also allowed the display of localized issues and other features.

---