WebDev3000 » Extras

Domainr

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:20:43 +0000

While the domain name won’t really make the difference between success and failure, it’s surely better to have a site accessed via vegetabl.es instead of isellfreshvegetables.com, don’t you think? Sure, that was just an example, since I don’t think anyone bothered to touch the fresh vegetables online sales niche… although vegetabl.es seems to have been purchased already by someone, parked, and now is for sale. Too bad, but I am sure you can still find a bunch of interesting domain names, especially when using a tool like Domainr!

The main purpose of this Web-based tool is to help you find good domains for your needs, taking things a bit further than the notorious COM-NET-ORG crowd. For example, if you look for “automobile,” you’ll also get suggestions like auto.mobi/le or automo.bi/le, and despite the fact these don’t look that good to me, finding interesting combos like blo.gs or lapto.ps is surely worth spending your time with Domainr (sorry to inform you, but both these two last domains have been taken already… and not by me).

Currently, Domainr covers virtually the entire global namespace, including country domains, second-level domains (co.uk or net.nz, for example), and even sponsored domains (.asia or .mobi), making it a very interesting and useful choice to those who really care about the naming process during the development of a site, as well as for those simply hunting for good domain names…

Compatibility: any major browser, but – as usual – be sure to turn off script blockers!

WebSVN

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:04:08 +0000

Early warning: if you’re not using subversion repositories or – even worse – you have no idea about what they are, you should move on to the next article! Good, now that I said that, let’s take a look at the open source, Web-based app that allows you to easily browse your subversion repositories, namely WebSVN!

As you can see in the image above, you can easily check previous operations, and apart from the logs, you also get access to the tree-style list of all the files changed, added or deleted. Even more, you can check the differences between two versions of the same file, but I think best thing to do would be to check the demo here and figure it out by yourself.

Anyway, if you’re one of the lazy ones (welcome to the club, by the way!), I am sure that features like the customizable templating system, RSS feed support, or colorization of file listing will push you to do the same thing I just mentioned: watch the demo and then, maybe, put WebSVN on one of your servers!

Compatibility: any major browser, but be sure to have a command line client of SVN at your disposal

SEO Analyzer

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:09:32 +0000

Most people around me still think that SEO is something that seems to be closely connected to Voodoo practices, but I strongly believe that the path from novice to SEO expert goes through a realm full of logical things and decency. I put it this way because most people who have at least some vague image of the whole deal know that spam sites can get good rankings and keep them, this happening simply because Google seems to have pretty loose spam rules, at least when faced with my personal feelings about spam… and I know I am not the only one considering a lot of notorious sites to be “spammy,” but let’s leave this delicate matter aside and move to SEO Analyzer, shall we?

First of all, you should install Adobe AIR (if you don’t have it already, of course), and then grab SEO Analyzer and fire it up. Once you finish installing it, enter the URL you want to check, a list of keywords, and then wait for the program to get all the info it needs to tell you a few interesting facts about keyword ranking, PR, and backlinks.

Sure, SEO Analyzer is far from being a comprehensive SEO tool, but it surely does its job well. Currently, it can get Google, Yahoo! and Bing rankings for the URL/keywords you enter, as well as Google PR for the sites backlinking to the one you entered.

At last, you should be aware that we’re talking about a free GPL-licensed tool, and if you’re really into getting your SEO work done without paying a single penny, SEO Analyzer is a good tool to start with…

Compatibility: SEO Analyzer need Adobe AIR installed, and access to the Internet, so if it doesn’t work, you may want to check your firewall settings…

hurl

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:22:45 +0000

While deploying a site may not give you really big headaches, keeping it up can surely do that, no matter how reliable may be the server(s) used to host that site. Being able to send custom HTTP requests and view the responses in a timely manner can help troubleshooting a Web-based project a lot, and that’s exactly what hurl does!

To be more accurate, we’re talking about another online service designed to help Web developers, and since it’s also free, I don’t see any reason for those involved in building (but especially troubleshooting) various sites to stay away from hurl.

The story is very short, because all you have to do is open the page, enter any URL you need to check, then add any number of headers to the request, define user-pass for HTTP authentication, as well as to choose setting the request to follow redirects… or not. At last, you can even sign up and save the requests-responses for future comparison. Pretty cool, if you ask me… don’t you agree?

Compatibility: any major browser – after all this is a very basic tool, and I had no problems playing with it in Safari, IE, Opera, or Chrome (anyway, as usual, you should be careful about disabling script blockers)

Dead-Links.com

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:44:38 +0000

If you think that building a website is hard, then you should think about maintaining it! Obviously, you can easily use some CMS, work on the template, and the site is ready… but you don’t want to think about broken links that appear once you change permalink settings, or when the sites you linked to some months ago disappear! OK, such things happen, but how to spot broken links before your users start complaining about them?

The answer to the question above is a website that can take care of finding your dead links, but solving the problems will be your job. This site is called Dead-Links.com, and while its design is about a decade behind the rest of the world, it gets the job done, and that’s what really matters, after all.

How to use it? Nothing easier – just point your browser to it, enter the URL of the site you want to check, and then wait for the dead links to come out, while praying for this not to happen…

In the end, you will get a pretty long listing with the links from the target site, and if you’re in a hurry, just scroll down to see the invalid links and the error message returned by each of them. Once you do this, the time comes for you to fix the errors… so now I’ll just pull back and let you do that!

Compatibility: Dead-Links.com works great with any browser you throw at it, and being given its “ancient looks,” I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it works even with those text-based browsers some Linux users mess with from time to time

Website Grader

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:06:43 +0000

Back in elementary school, everyone was crazy about grades. I had maximum ones all the way (10/10), but couldn’t care less about that. Even today I feel this way, but that’s only related to school, because when it comes to my work, I like to polish things as many times as needed to be happy with the result. Anyway, I am sure that most successful Web designers also thing this way, so Website Grader will surely find a spot in their arsenal.

Website Grader can provide a well done report and grade for all that’s connected with your website’s SEO, like Metadata information, Heading and Image Summary, Interior Page Analysis (for each processed page, you get to see the keywords and description), detailed off-page SEO info (domain age/expiration date, PageRank, inbound links, and so on), and there’s even a “Blogosphere” section… but it doesn’t stop here!

Unfortunately, I will stop here, but if you’re not one of those who like to enter the email address to get reports without knowing exactly what information they’ll provide, be sure to check this sample report generated by Website Grader. That’s all, folks!

Compatibility: IE, Opera, Firefox 3.5, Safari, Google Chrome – you name it, I had no problems with Website Grader in any of the browsers above

Popuri.us

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:58:32 +0000

Between those straightforward online tools that will give you just a tiny piece of information instantly and those that make you wait at least a minute or so, and then deliver all the info you need, as well as some details that most people simply don’t care about, there’s a category of tools that manage to provide just what a large category of developers may need…

… and if we talk about Google, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast Rank, Google, Yahoo and Live Search backlinks, as well as some extra stuff, we end up facing tools like Popuri.us. Fortunately, this one comes for free, so let’s take a quick look at it, shall we?

Basically, I already told you what this free online tool does, but apart from having to enter a valid URL, pressing the Get info button, and then wait for the results to show up, there’s a little bit that can really make the difference! What am I talking about here? Widgets! That should say it all, so I will conclude this short article here. I hope you’ll find Popuri.us useful, since although you won’t use it on a daily basis, this one is surely a site worth being bookmarked!

Compatibility: be careful with your script blocker, if you’re using any; other than that, Popuri.us works without problems with all major browsers, including Firefox 3.5, Safari, Opera, and IE

Xinu

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 06:46:31 +0000

Finally, we get back to some SEO tools. Since there are plenty of them available online, and some of them offer pretty rich features for no price, finding the best ones is a very hard task, if not impossible, but moving around and checking out the most interesting ones is surely more than just research work – to me, it’s a joyride!

Xinu, or Xinu Returns, is a very useful online tool that allows you to easily find out how’s your site doing in this eternal battle with its competitors in fields like PageRank, backlinks, indexed pages, amount of social bookmarks, and so on.

A very funny thing that I noticed is that if your site doesn’t have any presence at all on del.icio.us, the message displayed by Xinu is “N.ot .ava.ila.ble.” That’s a good one, it really made me laugh for a while!

Other than that, there’s a lot to find out with Xinu’s help, and since using it is completely free… I guess it won’t hurt a try, don’t you think?

Compatibility: I played with this tool in Opera, Firefox 3.5, Chrome, IE, Safari, and I got tired of it – it works like a charm in all of them, so no use in trying any others, don’t you think?

Self SEO Speed Checker

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:06:26 +0000

Ever wondered how fast is loading a certain website? Sure, sure, you can get a chronograph at hand and do some timed page loading sessions, but why not just type the URL, press a button, and wait for the results to come out, including loading speed and speed/KB?

Self SEO offers a very useful free website speed checker that’s nothing more than a free online service doing exactly what I said before. While some may say that tools offering you all the info you need are the key to success, I also think that tiny ones aiming a single target are also pretty good.

In our case, you can enter up to 10 domain in the input box, one per line, and then press the Check! button. Results come up almost instantly, and for each site you get the size of the homepage, its load time, and the average speed per KB.

At last, you should also scroll down a little to check some website speed up tips – they may be basic things, but it’s always good to get back to the basics, especially since some of the Web designers who started working recently seem to forget about such easy rules like “no whitespaces,” “optimized images” or “no nested tables,” so they should definitely take a look…

Compatibility: Self SEO’s speed checker works with IE, Firefox, Opera, Maxthon… basically any major (or not) browser you may use

Google Trends

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:26:38 +0000

Most keyword-related tools come for a pretty high price, no matter if they are online ones, or specialized programs for your PC/Mac/mobile phone. Fortunately, there’s always some freebie to put the paid ones to shame, and the first one that comes into my mind, at least when talking about keywords, is Google Trends.

When I encountered it for the first time, it was a few years back, with the help of a friend of mine. We were talking about some keyword’s popularity, and he told me to check it on Google Trends. This made me extremely ashamed, simply because I had no idea about it. I became even more ashamed when he told me to go to www.google.com/trends – wasn’t that already obvious?

To make a longer story short, Google Trends helps you find out how popular is a particular search term across various areas, by displaying graphs with the volume of searches since 2004, as well as results broken down by region, city, and language.

Google Trends also comes with some advanced tools, namely Google Insights for Search and Trends for Websites, but we’ll talk about these two in the future. Since using it is as easy as entering one or more keywords (separated by commas, in this case) and pressing the “Search Trends” button in the end, I think there’s one more thing left to mention here, and that is compatibility.

Compatibility: as expected, Google Trends has no problems working with virtually any browser you can think of, since I used it on Opera, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox, Flock, Safari (the Windows version), Google Chrome, and Avant