Mark, maybe this is the answer.  The only issue I see with uptimerobot though is the fact that a front-end might be up and showing up with uptime robot, but the backend might be down and the pool isn't mining.  That's why I use to uptime stats on my pool- one for the website and one for stratum.  A pool worker would supply a API JSON string that you could use to do a getdashboarddata or getpoolhashrate query.  The hashrate stat would quickly show what pools are mining and which ones are dead.

What if the website had a dynamically-updated list of pools, showing which were online? Just off the cuff I'm thinking there'd need to be an account/worker for each pool, then a daemon on the website could poll a certain frequency to make sure it can connect, and show online/offline. If offline for X amount of time, it would drop down the list into the 'offline' section.
Or something.

Can anyone here please tell me which pool does work...