---
title: Ride the Toad
teaser: Introducing Hoptoad, a Rails error catcher web service.
tags: news,airbrake,web
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2008-07-29
---
As [previously](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/little-green-friend) [alluded
to](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/a-http-testing-proxy) - we are pleased to
formally launch [Hoptoad](http://www.hoptoadapp.com) today. We've been using
the service on various internal and client applications that we maintain over
the last six months, and have watched with pride as our tadpole of an error
catching web service has matured into the crazy toad that it's become. It's
been sort of like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, though I can't describe in exactly which
ways.
Anyway, the service is intended to work as a replacement for the Exception
Notifier rails plugin, except instead of sending you email to report on app
errors, it sends them via a web service into a hosted application which allows
you to view them at a later date. On the app side, you can sort by project,
mark resolved/unresolved, and view the bulk of the environment and request
details which were present when the error occurred.
We plan on adding more options for analysis and charting, an official service
API (to support plugins
for other frameworks besides rails), an official information API (to pull aggregated error
data out of the service), more communication options (currently only email+web,
we may add SMS, twitter, xmpp, etc).
But for now, the service is at least as good as the EN was for us, so it's time
to launch. The duplicate error identification alone is worth the price of
admission.
Oh yeah, the price of admission is zero. Get in there and sign up.
It's time to **RIDE THE TOAD** @ [www.hoptoadapp.com](http://www.hoptoadapp.com)
Report issues & submit requests @ the [official support
lighthouse](http://thoughtbot.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14635/home)
FYI: _Hoptoad/Airbrake was sold to RackSpace and is now called [Airbrake Bug Tracker](http://airbrake.io)_.