Hey, Clock Fans, we’re very happy to be writing this blog post, because it’s generally just a couple times of year that we release a new alarm clock.

And, yes, we’re here to announce the creation of a new clock – the Online Video Alarm Clock !

We’re living in a time and age when online videos are becoming more and more of an important, integral part of our daily lives on the internet. Did you know, for example, that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute? Or that YouTube now qualifies as the world’s most-watched television “channel”.

And it’s for good reason: online videos are fun, entertaining and they can even be educational, and YouTube is easily the best video portal online.

These are some of the reasons for the creation of our new Video Alarm Clock.

We love online videos. We watch them every day. We share them with our friends. So why not use them as alarms on our Online Alarm Clock?

This was a concept that we’d had in the back of our minds for a long time…we just needed enough time to flesh it out. And the results can now be seen (and used) online.

There are no special requirements for using our Online Video Alarm Clock. All you need is a normal web browser capable of displaying web pages using Flash, cookies and JavaScript…and you obviously need an internet connection.

We’ve posted more detailed information regarding about our Video Clock on our Video Alarm Clock FAQs Page, so be sure and take a look there in case you have a few questions that haven’t been answered in this blog post.

But basically, Video Alarms are incredibly easy to use. Just visit our Video Clock and enter into our search box the URL for any page on YouTube.com with a video that you like (for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnBqf5QFVys).

Alternately, you can simply find the ID for a particular video on YouTube (such as: bnBqf5QFVys, using the sample URL above) and enter that into our Video Clock’s search field .

Also, you can simply pass the URL for a YouTube Video page to our Video Clock by accessing it directly in your browser's address field as shown above.

But if you really just want to find a video quickly, you can also enter a search keyword into our Video Clock’s search box, and our video clock will return the top search results from YouTube related to that keyword. You can then preview one of these videos, and select it as your video alarm.

Finally, we’ve gone even a step further to ensure that using our Video Alarm Clock is easy to use: we’ve constructed a very handy Bookmarklet that you can add to your web browser.

A Bookmarklet is a button that you add to your web browser’s favorites toolbar. Such a button performs some kind of useful task when you click on it. In the case of our Video Alarm Bookmarklet, all you have to do is visit any page on YouTube.com containing a video that you like. Click on our Bookmarklet, and you’ll be taken to a preview page on our Video Alarm Clock that’ll show you what it looks and sounds like as an alarm, giving you the option of selecting it as your alarm video.

Here's a screenshot of our Video Alarm Bookmarklet being dragged and added to the Bookmark Toolbar in Firefox.

Once you’ve selected an alarm video, you can save it as a bookmark or recommend it to your friends and family by clicking on our link marked “Bookmark & Share“. [And yes, the more devious of you may discover that this is a good method to RickRoll someone!]

Wake up to your favorite YouTube videos using our Video Alarm!

You can only have one active alarm at a time. However, by bookmarking your favorite alarm videos, you can easily find them again and switch back and forth among numerous cool videos.

Please note that, if you want to use a video as an alarm, you’ll have to visit the Video Alarm Clock and not our original Online Alarm Clock.

Our original Online Alarm Clock is so popular and successful, that we’d have to be tortured severely before we would make any significant changes to it. (We know, through feedback from our loyal users, that most of them want it to remain unchanged, like the classic that it is!)

So – hopefully this blog post will suffice as an introduction to the newest member of the Online Alarm Clock family, our Video Alarm Clock!

We hope that this new clock is a lot of fun for all of you to use, both as a tool for online reminders, as well as a full-fledged alarm clock to wake you up in the mornings.

As ever, feel free to send us any comments, questions or suggestions you might have about our alarm clocks at any times, either via the comments form below, or via the email address found on our “about” page, or via Facebook or Twitter.

We wish you pleasant dreams and lots of fun using our clocks!

Tags: New on Online Clock, online alarm clock, online clock, online video alarm clock, online video clock, video alarm, video alarm clock, video alarm clock bookmarklet, video clock

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Reasons To Use An Online Stopwatch
• Video Clock Demonstration
• Clocks That Run Backwards

Hey Clock Fans, now that the Alarm Clock Blog here has been up and running for about a year and a half, we’ve been thinking that it’s high time that we go ahead and describe to all of you what our original idea for this blog really was – because the original idea is definitely a bit different than how it turned out to be.

As you all know by now, we run the world’s original Online Alarm Clock website.

It’s customary for software companies and web applications to create a blog, which will then be used as a vehicle for communicating everything that’s new and improved with their software or web service.

In our case, we’re confident that we’ve pretty much hit upon perfection with the design of our Alarm Clock. We’re sorry if this sounds arrogant or like we’re bragging, but this is really the truth.

It was our goal to create the world’s first Alarm Clock you can use right in your web browser, without downloading or installing anything, and of course we’ve done just this…we went live with our Alarm Clock Website back on March 24th in 2006.

If you ever discover some other Online Alarm Clock website, go to whois.domaintools.com and check the age of their domain. Then go to archive.org and try to see just how long they’ve been online…

Our point with all of this is simply to state the fact that people are copycats. And sure, it’s not a huge problem – “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, as they say. But we do like to remind you occasionally that OnlineClock.net is in fact the original site of this kind.

Not only were we the first website designed to be an Alarm Clock, but we’re also the best…even to this day, several years later.

Why?

It’s because our Clocks are minimally designed with simplicity in mind.

We all know about the meteoric rise of Twitter.com, and Twitter has become a star with very good reason: it’s a great, simply-designed website that’s astonishingly easy to use. Just last week we were looking at the computer books in a local bookstore and saw books that claimed to show you “How to Use Twitter”. The reason why this is so hilarious is: Twitter is so easy, no one really needs a book about how to use it!

Similarly, we also believe it’d be ridiculous to have a “How To” guide on how to use our Alarm Clock.

If you look at our start page, you won’t find any explanatory text there – our clock is so self-explanatory, that even your grandmother will figure it out instantly.

We like this. And we’re devoted to keeping our site this way.

Which takes us back to the theme of this blog post:  what we’d originally conceived our Alarm Clock Blog to be like.

You see, while all these other software and web 2.0 companies’ blogs write about the “killer new features” they keep adding to their sites…we just wanted to post this same message once a day:

Today we refrained from making any changes to our alarm clock.

And the next day the blog post would be this:

Today we refrained from making any changes to our alarm clock.

And then the day after that:

Today we refrained from making any changes to our alarm clock.

Well, we think you get the idea…

So, when it comes to changes to our Alarm Clock, we’re very happy to confirm this:

There aren’t any.

Tags: alarm clock, alarm clock blog, alarm clock changes, changes to online clock, clock, New on Online Clock, online alarm clock, online clock changes, software, web2.0

• Famous Modern Clocks
• The Dark Is Your Friend
• The Battle For Your Wrist
• The Answer To Why We Sleep
• Famous Clocks You Should Know About

So please, go ahead and participate in the magic trick below which we like to call “The Magician’s Clock“.

We’re quite sure it’ll amaze you, your family and your friends!

The Magician’s Clock – Step One

Pick a number from the Clock Face that you see above – any number at all, but it must be one of the numbers that you actually see on the Clock Face.

(This means it must be a number between one and twelve, obviously, and it must be an integer.)

Then, make sure you concentrate very hard on this number – it’s your official Magic Clock Number!

Now, please think about your number.

Focus on your number.

Try to send OnlineClock.net brainwaves referring to your Magic Clock Number.

Also, please remember this number for the next step of our Magic Clock Trick.

Have you done all this?

Good.

Then you’re ready to proceed to Step Two…

The Magician’s Clock – Step Two

Okay, now in the second phase of our Clock Magic Trick, we’d like you to start from the Magic Clock Number you’d chosen in step one and then follow the line going from it to the number which appears across from it on the clock face above.

What this means is that, if you chose number Two as your Magic Clock Number in the first step, for example, you would then follow the line from the number Two across the clock’s face to get to number Eight.

Or, to use another example, if you’d instead chosen number Ten in the first step of our magic trick, you would then follow the line from number Ten to arrive at number Four.

Got it?

Done?

Okay, now you should have two numbers.

Go ahead and subtract the smaller of your two numbers from the larger number.

When you’re finished–and only when you’re finished!–you may proceed to the next step in our Clock Magic Trick – the grand finale below.

The Magician’s Clock – The Grand Finale

That’s it, folks!

We think we’ve successfully predicted what your final number will be, and that is…The Magic Number Six

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little clock-themed magic trick which we’ve named The Magician’s Clock.

And now that you’ve experienced the awe and wonder of our magic trick, please go out and tell everyone that you know that OnlineClock.net is a magical website!

Thank you for taking part in our magic trick and we hope that you’ll continue to stop by to read more posts  on our Alarm Clock Blog in the future.

Our blog writes about anything and everything related to alarms, clocks and the subject of time, but we like to have a lot of fun along the way.

Please take the time to subscribe to our blog’s Alarm Clock Newsfeed by clicking on our newsfeed’s link and subscribing to it in Firefox or whatever other RSS Newsreader you prefer using.

Until next time – happy clocking, fellow magicians!

Tags: alarm clock blog, clock, clock magic, clock magic trick, magic trick, magic trick with clock, magician's clock, online clock, online clock magic, online clock magic trick

• The Dark Is Your Friend
• The Battle For Your Wrist
• The Answer To Why We Sleep
• Famous Clocks You Should Know About
• Online Pomodoro Timers And How To Use Them

Put on your Geek glasses and pocket protector and prepare to Geek-out with us, as we delve into the depths of some...Online Alarm Clock Trivia!

Hey Clock Fans, in March of next year we’ll be celebrating four years of being online as the original Online Alarm Clock, and we’ve been thinking that some of you still might know as much about our clock website as you would like to.

For this reason we’ve created this blog post by compiling some of the top Online Alarm Clock Trivia Tips with details and information about OnlineClock.net that’s intended really just for our true fans.

But, by looking at our traffic numbers each month, we know that there are actually a whole lot of you out there!

So sit back, relax, tune in to some groovy music channel on our Clock Radio application to use as background music, and enjoy our list of factoids about everyone’s favorite web-based internet alarm clock.

Here’s our list of Online Alarm Clock Trivia, presented in no particular order of importance:

1. Online Clock was the world’s first website designed to be an internet alarm clock. Since then, we’ve spawned literally dozens of imitators.
2. OnlineClock.net went online back on March 24th, 2006.
3. We made it to the front page of Digg.com the same year, with this story (posted by someone else). This gave our site a huge jump-start (thank you, Digg!!!).
4. We currently have not just one, but over ten different kinds of Online Alarm Clocks which you can find on our Site Map page.
5. OnlineClock.net was created by an American web developer named Tom, a guy who moved from San Francisco to Berlin, Germany about ten years ago. In addition to Online Clock, Tom is a big fan of comics and punk rock.
6. In fact, Online Clock continues to be developed, maintained and marketed by a single individual (we sometimes write using ‘we’ or refer to the ‘OnlineClock.net Team’ just because it sounds kind of lame writing about the site using “I” all the time. Being run by one person has its drawbacks, including the fact that I have to write blog posts like this one sometimes even when I’m on vacation (!). But heck, it’s all worth it…
7. At the time this article was written, OnlineClock was receiving about 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
8. OnlineClock runs on a dedicated Linux server (because they’re the best servers in the world – go Linux!!!)
9. Our Alarm Clock Blog that you’re reading now runs using the popular WordPress open source blogging system (it’s simply the best blogging software on the planet).
10. Although OnlineClock.net has been profitable for some time now, we probably don’t get that much back from it if you take into consideration all of the hours of work we put into it. But hey, that’s OK because the site truly is a labor of love. We really, really care about OnlineClock.net, and we hope that you notice this in various ways, such as the fact that we refuse to over-commercialize the site and we keep our use of advertising tasteful and non-intrusive!

So there you have it, Clock Fans: that was a list of various Online Alarm Clock Trivia which was especially selected for those of you who consider yourself true OnlineClock freaks.

And, judging from the reactions we receive via email, via our Facebook and Twitter account, we know that there are a lot of rapid OnlineClock.net followers out there.

We’re delighted to have all of you as fans – thank you for helping to make Online Clock what it is today!

Tags: alarm, alarm clock, clock, clock radio, internet alarm clock, online alarm clock, online clock, onlineclock, onlineclock.net

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Famous Clocks You Should Know About
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Reasons To Use An Online Stopwatch
• Down With Sleep Disorders

Actually, the title of this post could also be: “What Makes A Classic Clock Website?”.

But what we’re talking about here applies to any kind of product…not just a clock, or a website.

Because this is going to be another Online Alarm Clock rant telling about our aims, goals and philosophy, together with an analysis for why our alarm clock site has become so popular.

If you look at the history of online alarm clocks on the internet, and examine the various players in this space, you will indeed find that Online Clock was the first website to go online with the goal of being simply…an alarm clock.

Since we went live back on March 24th, 2006 a lot of copycats have sprung up on the internet, copying our original idea of creating a website that should be used as an online alarm clock.

Still, all of these competitors have failed up to now in gaining the kind of user base and popularity that we’ve achieved with Online Clock.

Why is this?

Well, it’s because almost all of our competitors fall prey to Feature Glut.

Here’s a quote from Aidan Henry, from his blog post “Too Many Features” in which he spells out the advantages of paring down a product to just the essential features list:

How often do you read a features set that is over a page long and you’re left wondering… “WTF does this thing actually do for me?” It’s a daunting reality. Now, isn’t it refreshing when you browse a feature set that is minimal (only in terms of size). You can paint a clear picture in your head as to what the system/site/software can accomplish for you.

And, to follow up, Chris Dame discusses the big disadvantages of overly feature-laden products, from his blog post “Feature Explosion“:

The mentality that you are missing out by not cramming every possible feature into something you pay for is self-defeating. People forget that for every feature you add, there needs to be a way to access it. Quickly you have gadgets with screen after screen of options, and suddenly you can’t get past the kitchen timer and movie player just to place a call.

Definitely, when it comes to Tech, or websites, simplicity is no joke. It makes the difference between a normal website and a website that reaches classic status.

If you look at the mega success stories of Google and Twitter, what do they have in common?

They’ve made their products simpler to use than their competitors.

But the importance of simplicity and minimal design doesn’t just apply to websites. It’s certainly not just a coincidence, for example, that the creators of Online Clock are huge fans of the following cultural icons:

Charles Bukowski - An Example of Simplicity in Literature

Charles Bukowsi: his stripped-down prose shows that simpler is better, even in literature. Read his novel Post Office and try not to consider it timeless literature. The carefully selected and simple words drill like short, sharp shocks to your brain, leaving you wondering how in the heck you could’ve read all those other long-winded writers.

The Ramones - An Example of Simplicity in Music

The Ramones: forget about long, self-indulgent guitar solos and instead make your point, make it quickly, then stop. That’s what the Ramones do. Is it punk? Or is it just really intelligent, simple pop? It doesn’t matter, because it’s just damn good, blowing away all that progressive hippie-arena-rock-crap music that was being made at the time they were around.

Mondrian - An Example of Simplicity in Painting

Mondrian: it’s not just about the colors and shapes. It’s about the empty space and the silence that you can find between and around these elements. A lot of people that I know and love still maintain that this isn’t real art. But that’s okay – they just don’t get it.

Mies van der Rohe - An Example of Simplicity in Architecture & Design

Mies van der Rohe: his “skin and bones” architecture and furniture design reduced everything down to its elements, creating classic designs that will never be forgotten. During his time many people found his work just “industrial” and ugly. But over the years it’s been acclaimed as some of the most elegant design work ever created.

And, yes, let’s add this to the list above:

Online Clock - An Example of Simplicity in Websites

The Online Alarm Clock: its name says what it does. Period. It works. People like it. We don’t mess with a winning formula. Even people who don’t read TechCrunch on a regular basis know how to use our alarm clock instantly. There is no need for a description or explanation for how the site is supposed to work.

Perhaps, at this point, a few of you are thinking that we’ve gone insane, mentioning our alarm clock website in the same breath with these great design pioneers and geniuses?

Megalomania?

We don’t think so.

And the reason why is: the entire time that OnlineClock.net has been online, it’s been preoccupied with design and minimalism and, yes, even art. We like to think that our website is a great example of the successful integration of art and commerce.

Sure, you’ll find advertising on our site, and by definition that makes us a commercial website. But the advertising has remained tasteful and restrained, and even complements the design of the entire website, adding useful information.

How many other websites can say the same?

And how many other websites are there that have perhaps created a pleasant design and a loyal user base, but have forgotten, along the way, to find a way to monetize their site…thus leaving them playing a frantic game of “catch up”, struggling to find ways to earn money from a website which costs them a small fortune in hosting and bandwidth costs, just to keep it online and accessible, 24 hours a day?

Not too many, sadly. The air is thin up here.

The world keeps changing, becoming more complex, and human beings feel increasingly overwhelmed by these changes.

As a case in point, we went out to purchase a new mobile phone recently. We were bombarded with offers for mobile phones that could surf the internet, play music, play videos, send text messages, send messages with images, play games , take photos and videos and then send them around the world or upload them to websites.

All we wanted was a mobile phone that could–guess what?–make telephone calls.

Such a device is hard to find, but, once we found a mobile phone with fewer features, it instantly became more attractive to us, and we bought it. We are not alone.

The time has come for an advanced sense of aesthetics, in which enlightened product designers can truly make the world a more attractive, enjoyable and useful place simply by designing simpler objects.

When you purchase a new automobile these days, you’re probably going to find complex systems of electronics that do everything for you except prepare and cook your evening meal. But what are the side effects of such complexity? You’re going to be requiring the assistance of your neighborhood mechanic more and more often, since increased complexity means something’s more likely to break.

Stop. Using. Complex. Objects.

Instead, demand that the objects we become dependent upon are intelligently designed, with simplicity in mind.

Reward products that do follow the laws of simplicity by purchasing them, sponsoring them and by becoming their fans.

In time, complex designs will become less profitable…and less dominant.

Helping this process along is one way that OnlineClock can make the world a better place.

Tags: alarmingly simple, feature glut, minimal design, minimal web design, minimalism, online alarm clock, onlineclock.net, onlineclock.net history, simple design, simplicity in design

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Video Clock Demonstration
• The Time For An Alarm Is Now
• Introducing Our Video Alarm

Hey, we were too busy working hard to notice that the Alarm Clock Blog has passed the one year mark.

That’s right: Online Clock has been online now posting stories about alarms, clocks and anything time-related for over one full year!

During this time we’ve picked up a lot of experience.

Yes, we’ve come a very long way, we think, from our first post, in which we truly didn’t know what we were doing.

And why do I keep writing “we” here? Because actually this blog, like the entire OnlineClock.net website, is a labor of love from one single individual, the creator of the Online Alarm Clock. That’s me, and my name’s Tom. I just happen to also be the author of all these blog posts. (So you know who to complain to, if you don’t like them!)

Yes, I’d read in a lot of different places that blogs are supposed to be very good for marketing a website.  The actual “work” of writing a blog sounded like a lot of fun to me. I used to work as an advertising copywriter, and, before that, I was an English major in college, so the writing part seems to come pretty easily to me, Thank God!

Sometimes it’s a little difficult thinking up subject material for the Alarm Clock Blog, and I sometimes experience brief periods of writers’ block, but this always disappears eventually, and the words start flowing again.

So, the purpose of this post is to have a little look at the past year or so of the Alarm Clock Blog’s existence and to highlight a few posts that we particularly like, for whatever reason (there I go again using “we”…well, please excuse me – it simply sounds better than writing “I” all the time!).

Without further ado, we present to you: the first round of Highlights from the Alarm Clock Blog ! (A drum roll, please!)

Click on any of the Alarm Clock Blog screenshots below to read the post that’s being referred to in each short description:

"The Toaster Alarm Clock", in which we claim to have discovered an alarm clock that makes toast for you when it wakes you up.

"Online Clock Starts Web 5.0", in which we poke fun at the wacky "Web 2.0" world by claiming to start the next relevant trend after "Web 3.0".

"Why I Am The Clock Man": an actually very serious and accurate biographical look at how Online Clock's creator ended up making the site. It's been a long, wild ride!

"Clockux - The Online Clock Operating System", in which we poke a little fun at the Linux community by claiming to be working on our own version of Linux, designed to be simply...an alarm clock!

"50 Clock and Roll Songs", a blog post in which OnlineClock.net butchers the song titles of fifty very popular rock and pop songs, altering them so that they contain the word "Clock" in their song titles (sorry, we're just like that).

So there you have it, Clock Fans – that’s OnlineClock’s own official list of the best Alarm Clock Blog posts from the first year of our blog’s operation (approximately, that is – the last blog post in the list might have been published a little after our anniversary…but, heck, who’s counting?!).

And what do all of these featured blog posts have in common?

They all have something to do with alarms, clocks or the Online Alarm Clock (duh!).

Most of them seem to be spoofs or parodies…because I guess we don’t like to take things too seriously at OnlineClock.net.

Life is far too short and, frequently, too absurd for that.

So let’s just have some fun together, shall we?

For this reason we hope that YOU, dear Clock Fans and loyal Alarm Clock Blog readers, will stick around with us for many more years to come!

And we’re quite serious about that.

Now…will you please go out and GET A JOB?

Tags: alarm blog, alarm clock blog, alarm clock blog highlights, best of alarm clock blog, clock blog, clock blog highlights, online alarm clock blog, online clock blog, online clock blog highlights

• The Dark Is Your Friend
• The Battle For Your Wrist
• The Answer To Why We Sleep
• Famous Clocks You Should Know About
• Online Pomodoro Timers And How To Use Them

Productivity? What productivity…does looking at your office clock feel like having a loaded gun held to your head?

Here we are, at the start of a new work week, and if you’re like us, you’re swamped with work.

Looking at the pile of emails that’s accumulated in your inbox over the weekend can get a little depressing and you might not know how you should best begin.

Not only do we work on this website every day (it’s a labor of love), but we’re also in the IT business, which means we also work full time on internet sites at work.

As you can imagine, managing an extremely popular site like the Online Alarm Clock, in addition to a horde of large client websites means that time management is extremely important.

We’re sure that a lot of you reading this are in a similar position: you have too many tasks to perform, and seemingly not enough time in which to get them all done.

So please take advantage of the following Online Clock Time Management Tips:

1. Make a list. Any kind of list: a plain text file in Windows notebook is what we prefer, instead of anything fancier. Try using this tool for creating simple lists.
2. Prioritize. Before you begin working on anything, you need to prioritize the items on your list. This can help you avoid spending way too much time on tasks that in reality aren’t all that important
3. Delegate, delegate, delegate: if there is someone else in the office who can do the task, give it to him or her without hesitation. You can only be successful if you keep the big picture in mind.
4. Don’t get distracted. Once you’ve made your list and have prioritized the items and are ready to begin, you must make sure that other, newer tasks that might land in your lap don’t succeed in distracting you from your goal. This is easier to say than to do: whenever coworkers come to you with important tasks, it’s sometimes necessary to tell them that they must wait.
5. Make a plan for how much you expect to finish each day, and then do your best to achieve this quota. Only in this manner can you actually make true progress.
6. Set intermittent alarms as reminders that the time limit you’ve allocated for each task has been used up. This will help you keep on schedule and assure that, at the end of the day, you’ve accomplished all that you’ve set out to.
7. Take breaks and try not to work overtime. Working like a demon at a wild pace might help you get more done, but only in the short term. Learn to call it quits at a reasonable hour and then to shed yourself of worries and thoughts about work once you’ve left the office. Only in this manner do you have a good chance of returning to work refreshed and ready to accomplish more the next day. Don’t be tempted to burn the midnight oil: this will ultimately lead to burnout, and by burning out you’ll end up being far less productive than if you’d worked at a slower, steadier pace.
8. Finally, ignore 99% of the Time Management-related bullshit which you can find on the internet! Truly, Time Management effectively just comes down to common sense. You don’t need expensive programs or books in order to learn how to manage your time more effectively. You just need to slow down, develop a routine that works for you and then follow your own good common sense. Chances are, you already have a good idea of what you need to change in order to work more effectively.

We’re not saying that our Online Alarm Clock is a sure-fire method of improving your productivity. However, it can indeed help.

We’ve received feedback from many persons telling us that, by using our Alarm Clock to set simple reminders at work, they have been able to get much more work done.

For this task we not only have our normal Alarm Clock – we also have a Stopwatch function that can help you keep track of how much time you’re spending working on a specific task.

Try making a note beforehand regarding how much time you’d like to spend working on a specific task, and then use one of our Timers to help you stick to your Time Schedule according to plan. You can either set an Alarm Clock to remind you when the time has come to switch tasks, or you can set an Online Stopwatch or Timer to keep track of how many minutes have gone by.

Be sure to check out our entire collection of Time Tools in order to find the the ones that work the best for you.

Online Clock is glad to play a small part in helping you manage your time more effectively!

Tags: online alarm clock, online clock, online stopwatch, time management, time management tips, time schedule.productivity, time tools, timers

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Online Pomodoro Timers And How To Use Them
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Reasons To Use An Online Stopwatch
• Video Clock Demonstration

We’re proud to announce that everyone’s favorite Alarm Clock now has a presence on Twitter and Facebook.

If you’re a user of OnlineClock.net, we’d be very glad if you became a follower of us on Twitter, or a fan of our page on Facebook…or even both!

Online Clock is on Twitter

Online Clock is on Facebook

The web is a social medium, and that’s something pretty cool. We’re getting into the act by becoming involved promoting the world’s original Online Alarm Clock.

On both our Twitter and Facebook fan pages you’ll find frequent updates in the forms of listings of sites which have mentioned OnlineClock. We try to update these listings several times a day, so there should just about always be something new for you to discover.

We like to monitor who’s talking about us, and as soon as there’s a buzz about Online Clock somewhere we’ll be posting it up on our Twitter and Facebook pages.

One of the things that might strike you as interesting (especially if you’re a fan) when looking at the various sites that’ve mentioned the Online Alarm Clock is that they come from a very wide variety of different countries and are written in a wide range of different languages. This is of course proof that Online Clock has become an international phenomenon and encourage you to simply take part in our various social media communities and share the fun with your family and friends!

Our Facebook page additionally offers you the opportunity to discuss our website via an online discussion board, and shows you our ever-growing gallery of images and screenshots relating to OnlineClock.net.

So please – if you like or use OnlineClock.net, do us a favor and give us a little bit of your social media love !

Thanks in advance from the entire team at the Online Alarm Clock website.

P.S. : Please don’t forget – we’re also on YouTube ! If you like our Online Clock videos, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube newsfeed to keep informed whenever we’ve released a new one. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget Flickr !

Tags: facebook alarm clock, online alarm clock, online clock fan pages, online clock pages, online clock social media, onlineclock, onlineclock fans, onlineclock.net, social media, twitter alarm clock

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Video Clock Demonstration
• We Love Atomic Clocks
• The Time For An Alarm Is Now

Minute Timer in Green: Looking kinda Online Clocky, huh?

Minute Timer in Scrumptious Blue: How ya like us Now?!

Hey, Online Clock fans, it’s that time once again when we announce a new addition to the OnlineClock family of online alarm clocks.

Yes, indeed – we’ve created a new clock!

This one’s called the Minute Timer.

“What does it do”, you may ask?

Well, it counts down any given number of minutes.

“What, no bells, no whistles, no smoke and mirrors, no kitchen sink and five hundred other kinds of Ajax / Ruby / slight of hand magic?”

That’s right.

We’re serious about our simplicity. Not to mention too lazy to build all that complicated stuff.

If you don’t like it, go find some other lame website that has built itself up by becoming as complicated as possible! A site so complicated that you can’t even figure out how to use the damned thing anymore, at least, when it doesn’t happen to be offline due to some hacker having exploited a gaping security library in its neat-o special Scriptorific JavaScript dynamic Ajax do-wah-diddy library!

Do we sound bitter?

Well, we’re not… Well, we are! Ha ha. And we truly should not have had that last cup of coffee

All seriousness aside, folks, we hope our humble Minute Timer will serve you well.

Here are some suggested uses for it:

1. Time how long it takes you to turn blue after holding your breath
2. Time how long it takes the stock market to reverse all of its recent gains
3. Count down the last minute of your work day (the longest minute in the world?!)
4. Time how long it takes you to steep that teabag of Cassis-Cranberry-Mocha-Chai Tea you purchased at the gourmet store into one perfect cup of Yuppie Brew (did I say Yuppie? Man, that’s so 80s!)
5. On your first date? Well, you could time how long it takes you to…er, walk her home
6. Time those commercial breaks on your TV
7. You could use it to time the fastest event in the world, though you’d probably be better off using laser-cooled cesium atomic fountain frequency standards, known as cesium atomic fountain clocks (and yes, trying to read that page makes our brains hurt!)

Hey, are you guys having fun reading these blog posts? (Well, if not – don’t answer that question.)

We see the number of our subscribers increasing, and we have to say that writing these posts has somehow turned the corner from being a chore into being something that’s actually a lot of fun. Sheesh, when we think back on how awful our first posts on this blog were, we almost have to hide our clock faces in shame…but it’s all about learning while doing, you know?

Anyway, it’s great to see the traffic numbers for this blog increase over time and we’re glad many of you have become subscribers and loyal readers.

Stay tuned, clock fans:  if it’s fun for us, chances are it’ll be interesting for you to read.

…Well, maybe not, but it sounded good, didn’t it?

This blog post was written while listening to The Cars. Let the good times rolllllllll…

Tags: countdown, countdown clock, countdown timer, digital timer, minute countdown, minute timer, onlineclock, onlineclock.net

• We Love Atomic Clocks
• The Time For An Alarm Is Now
• Clocks In Ancient History
• Countdown Timer for The New Year
• Online Alarm Clock Trivia

This story begins back in 2006, the year in which Online Clock was born.

The first version of Online Clock went live on March 24th, 2006.

But it wasn’t until about a month later, on April 25th, 2005, that Archive.org first began indexing the world’s first online alarm clock website.

The people behind our Online Alarm site are simply humble web developers who had a great idea. (How we came up with this idea is a story unto itself which will be touched upon in a future blog post!)

The idea of creating an online alarm clock, a website that could be used as an alarm clock directly in your web browser, is a big one. We knew it would be a success as soon as the idea came to us. So it’s not surprising that hordes of imitators have sprung up over the years…

In the beginning it took about six months for things to start taking off. For several months our alarm clock site was online, but no one really noticed it. Then slowly some Spanish-language bloggers somehow discovered and began blogging about us.

But then suddenly, things took off, and they did so with a bang…and this is something that we’ll never forget.

And the truth is: we had nothing to do with it.

On September 6th, 2006, someone posted a story about our online alarm clock on Digg.com. On the very next day, this story made it to Digg’s front page and the world has never been the same for us since!

We can remember that our servers went down at least three times while our story was on Digg’s front page. Our web hoster at the time, once we’d contacted them and explained the reason for the huge sudden increase in traffic, did a valiant job of getting the server back online and keeping it online.

Screen Shot of the Digg Story that started it all!

As a result of getting on the front page of Digg, hundreds of people with blogs wrote blog articles about the world’s first online alarm clock…and our business was suddenly off and running.

It didn’t take long to discover that the new visitors OnlineClock.net received from all these blog posts kept coming back to use our alarm clock again and again…and that the idea of a browser-based alarm clock was an idea whose time had come.

Shortly after the immediate traffic rush was over, and the story about Online Clock had disappeared from Digg’s front page, our web hoster told us politely that we had outgrown their services and should instead seek a dedicated server somewhere else.

Since then, we’ve outgrown at least three other web hosters…which, we have learned, is one of the “problems” of having an extremely successful website: you must keep scaling your hosting power upward. We’ve now come to accept this “problem” and we now even welcome it, each time such a change becomes necessary!

We at Online Clock would now like to sincerely thank Digg.com and all the people who have blogged about us, posted stories about us, or in any other way shown their support for us over our three year-plus long history.

Thank you for making OnlineClock.net a big success!

We look forward to being your favorite alarm clock for a very long time to come

Tags: alarm online clock, digg alarm clock, digg clock, history of the online alarm clock, online alarm clock, online clock history, online clock on digg, onlineclock, onlineclock.net, onlineclock.net history

• Famous Modern Clocks
• Morning Sickness Poem
• Video Clock Demonstration
• We Love Atomic Clocks
• The Time For An Alarm Is Now