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Useful Utilities?
kberkit asks: "I've just started as a Web designer/Swiss-army-knife, In the crash course of my travails, I've come across some nifty online tools:
traceroute to find out what route and how long my Web pages are taking to load to outside servers; DNS lookup, to figure out what IP address a page is coming from; and online HTML validators to make sure my code is clean. I'm sure this is old hat to a lot of Slashdotters, but I'd be interested in knowing what other online tools others would suggest for us poor schleps who find ourselves expected to work miracles with little budget for proper software." For those of you who like traceroute and ping, may I recommend mtr as a supplement for your toolbox? What other small utilities have you all found useful in your day-to-day work lives?
It doesn't... It simply isn't under the default path for normal users on a few distributions.
/usr/bin.
The simplest thing to do would be symlinking it into
weblint, for one - this checks your HTML for validity. You'd be surprised how many sites, including really popular ones, use amazingly crappy HTML (*cough* Slashdot *cough*).
Another one is pngcrush - if you're creating png graphics, they're probably not as small as they could be - pngcrush will optimize the compression without messing with the # of colours in the graphic. Nice.
Another useful thing is to get a BUNCH of browsers, really old ones, too, for testing. I test from Navigator 2.x through the current, and MS IE 3.x through the current. With MS IE, that requires either multiple partitions or multiple machines - 3.x and 4.x don't install onto the same machine *sigh*. Also - don't forget Windows & Macs! Macs are very different, especially in how they render fonts, so test on Macs (Nav & IE there, too!). I had one site that wigged-out _only_ on Nav 4.5 for Mac. Weird. And scripting can get strange on different versions of IE - once had a site's javascript break _only_ on a particular version of IE 3.x for Windows _NT_ only. Strange strange strange.
You would do very well to code for XHTML rather than HTML - it forces you to get into good coding habits since it's rather particular (to put it mildly) about what's valid and what isn't. XHTML supposedly works down to second generation browsers.
Another good thing to test with is 'Bobby' - this is a program that tests for accessibility (for those with disabilities). Most of the web is an accessibility nightmare, unfortunately.
Okay, that's it - sorry no URLs right now...
Only thing, the domain name is misleading, as you don't get a traceroute but a measure of the time it took for a page to completely load.
Its great to compare and check webhosts and such. You find one with a great bunch of features but check it a few times during the day and find that their connectivity is pretty shoddy, now you know why the price was too good to be true.
Bleh!
I don't know if the $PATH thing is the problem it might be but maybe your permissions are off. some programs like bastille -linux changet suid programs to remove the executable bit for everybody. locate bin/traceroute | xargs ls -l will should come back with ....bin/nslookup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root
chmod if it doesn't
yah, I brake it all.....
If traceroute is in /usr/sbin and that is not in your PATH (type "echo $PATH" to check it), you can add that directory with this command: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin
But if you didn't know that, you also don't know about .profile and other details of your shell.
Traceroute web interfaces are fine, but can anyone answer me why traceroute has to be run as root on Linux?
Although I'm also fond of WebImage, it hasn't been updated in three years. After I gave these guys my money, I never heard a peep out of them until yesterday, when they spammed me.
Oh, sorry, they put me, without asking, on an "opt-in" news headline list, where they get revenue for every clickthrough. And even better, I can sign people up for it and get money for their clickthroughs! Feh. And when I contacted them, they of course told me that since I had given them my e-mail in 1997 (where the require it on every order), that they had put me on their "marketing" list. And since I was a customer, it couldn't be spam!
So beware of doing business with Group42.
Given that you're posting around here, I'm guessing you have a Linux box handy. Here are some of my favorite sysadmin tools:
As far as non-sysadmin stuff goes, here are some of my other favorites:
And if there are particular tasks that have you stumped, come back and ask again. 'Round these parts, we have big toolboxes.
The dictionary and gifoptimizer.com are the ones I use the most.
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Spelling by m-w.com.
Here' an article on site optimization I wrote a couple of years ago.
Paul Boutin | writer for Slate, Wired, etc
I can't count the number of times (in HTML or in any other language) I've accidentally left off the closing part of something (a tag, a comment, whatever) and inadvertantly nullified half of the file. Syntax highlighting is remarkably effecitve at preventing this and making you more productive overall (e.g. questions of "is that the right way to spell that reserved word" are moot when it's a different color when it's right).
On windows, my favorite programmer's editor ($20, 30 day trial shareware) is EditPlus. Small, fast, incredibly featureful and easy to extend. On Unix, Vim is the way to go (small, fast, simple interface you could learn in 10 minutes, syn coloring, etc.). If you're connecting into a remote unix machine to edit your code, check to make sure (ask the admins if need be) that your terminal emulator on the client machine is et right to support color (e.g. xterm-color for the $TERM variable).
If you're using windows and want a good free SSH and SCP (like a secure, network aware version of cp(unix)/copy(dos)), check out PuTTY SSH. Putty supports setting the TERM variable on login like I mentioned above. You can also use SSH to "tunnel" other applications over the encrypted stream (like FTP, checking mail, rsync, CVS, X11, etc etc.), but that's beyond the scope of this post (see the docs or do a web search).
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
AFAIK, both ping and traceroute use ICMP (internet control message protocol). On most systems, the ICMP socket is privileged such that only root can use it. Some systems tend to have sophisticated access control lists, for instance giving ping.exe and traceroute.exe access to a certain number of ICMP packets per minute.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
ok, it's a windows app,
but sam spade by blighty design has always been quite helpful for the ip side
The HTML validators on the W3 site are quite good,
fp!
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
Not really of course, but if you're in Bastard Operator From Hell mode, it's good for having fun with.
"You're still having IP conflict problems? See if you can Ping anything. Hmmm. Is it a Windows box? Run IPConfig - anything unusual? OK, try IPSquint; it's a bit more powerful. You've not got it installed? Odd."
Cue some Moe the Barman style fun as one of the developers goes on the hunt for a mythical app called IPSquint. .
First, who said you need a big budget for "proper software"?
I don't know how many people think of it but I've become very comfortable editing html over a telnet session with vi[m]. SSH with compression turned on is even better then telnet.
Also, sed, ps, find, grep are great little utils. I recently relized I could write quick shell scripts on the command line like this:
$ for x in `ls *.html`; do echo $x; done
I know that is very simple but it gives you an idea where to start.
Leknor
I like some of the tools listed on this page, it an ISP based out of tucson, AZ.
JMeter was so invaluable to me when I started programming high traffic websites, that I joined the project and started making contributions to it. JMeter is a tool that allows you to stress test a website by simulating multiple users accessing a website simultaneously. It really helps you find those bugs that only show up when a large number of users access a site.
Thanks for the advice everyone. BTW I am *shudder* developing for a NT server. My image is done on a Mac (got the good tools for that . "Save for web" on recent Adobe products is a godsend). Most of my coding gets done on a slow PC running '95.