I’l admit it. I’m a geek.
(I’m guessing all the ChurchMag team would also class themselves as such!)
There are a few sites & tools that I use to help me find out more about websites.
These can be useful when finding out information for clients or if I want to see if a site is legit.
Here’s what I use:
Network Tools is one of my most used tools. It’s really bunch of domain/website investigation tools in one place. I normally leave it on the default ‘Express’ option. Type a domain (only the domain and extension, no ‘www’ needed) or IP address in the box and hit the go button. Express shows you a bunch of the options: Lookup – basic information of what the IP of the site is and what country it’s hosted in;
- Trace – the network route to the hosting server for the site;
- DNS (Domain Name Servers) – some of the techy server set-up things;
- WHOIS (pronounced ‘who is’) – who is the registered holder of the domain and sometimes some of their contact information. Some domains opt out of WHOIS records, so no details are available. Also, on some domain types (.com, .co.uk, etc.) give you more information than others.
- Network Lookup – more detailed information about the hosting company;
These can all be handy for finding out who ‘owns’ a site and some of the details of where the site is hosted.
Network Tools can also do some simple emails checks, seeing a domain (or rather its IP) is on some of the major spam blacklists and the rooting/technical details of a full email address.
WhoIsHostingThis does what it says on the tin! Put a domain in the box (again no ‘www’ needed) and it tells you the hosting company, the IP address of the hosting server and the ‘nameservers’ for the domain. Although not as detailed as Network Tools, it displays the information in a much easier to understand way!
Great Firewall of China simply tells you if your site can be viewed in several cities/regions behind the ‘great firewall of China’. Many Christian based sites are blocked in China, but I’m glad to say that ChurchMag gets through!
Pingdom Tools helps you find how fast your (or any website) is loading and where potential loading bottlenecks could be. You can also test the loading of the site from Europe and the east and west coasts of the USA. Again, pop the domain in the box (and click settings for the location options) and hit ‘Test Now’.
The page will virtually load and show you loading bars of *all* the things that are loaded on the site – it can be quite a shock just how many things there are! When loaded it also tells you how many requests were made to the server to load the page, how long it took and the total size of the page.
If anything looks like it takes a long time to load, or any files are in red (missing) things really need looking at some more!
So those area few of my favourite geeky tools.
What are yours?!
[Image by Giuseppe Acquaviva]
Scott Lee says
Simple speed testing: http://www.blamestella.com/
Load testing: http://loadimpact.com/
James Cooper says
Thanks Scott, a couple of nice tools.
vietchristian says
I’ve been using the Network Tools. Thank you for other tools. I’ll check them out.
vietchristian says
I used these previously:
http://www.webpagetest.org
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
http://www.seo-browser.com/
Mark Robinson says
i always use good ol Google:
http://developers.google.com/pagespeed/