Record pin status to web; alerts

I have an Arduino Ethernet board connected to a momentary push button. I'm trying to monitor the status of this button online. I've looked at a couple things, nimbits and pachube but they really seem to be overkill. I only want to send data when the button changes state. Also, I do need it to be very reliable and have a way to alert me on my cell phone. I've also thought about directly sending an email notification or using twitter but being able to chart this button would be nice.

Does anyone know of a good reliable way to handle this?

I'm doing something similar. Have used Pachube in the past and it works well. There is some setup to do, but I don't consider it overkill. For the current project I'm using ThingSpeak because I just recently found out about it so thought I'd try it. It's working well too, and I like their Twitter interface. If you just care about state changes, maybe just send them as tweets and not log any data. I'm doing both, but you wouldn't have to. Am monitoring utility power for outages and my sump crock for a high water level. Not much more complicated than a button really, at the end of the day it's all the same, namely just an input to the microcontroller! Twitter in turn then sends a text to my phone. Here's my page with the ThingSpeak charts, and there is a link there to Twitter where the status changes are logged.

PS: One pitfall, Twitter will reject duplicate tweets sent via an app like ThingTweet, just as it does via the web interface. I worked around this by time-stamping the status messages.

Check out this project: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/12/snail-mail-push-alerts.html

It uses the Prowl API to push notifications to the Prowl app on your smart phone.

The Prowl app costs a few bucks on your phone - but it is very reliable and I have had great luck with it.

Prowl might be what you are looking for. Twillio is also realiable for making calls or sending SMS. If you use ThingSpeak, the app you are looking for is ThingHTTP. This allows you to send requestions from the Arduino to 3rd-party services like Prowl or Twillio. It would be trivial to monitor the status of the button.

Here are the related tutorials: