Orangeinks

Mobify.me: Create a Mobile Version of Your Website

Optimizing a website’s landing page for mobile viewing is not an easy task. That’s what Mobify.me is trying to solve. They aim to provide an easy way for developers to produce a mobile version of websites in just a few hours of work.

This will allow you to make a faster loading mobile version of your website. You can choose which elements you want to include and upload custom images optimized for mobile viewing. This means that you can lower the bandwidth cost of loading your site on a mobile device. Resizing images is one way of doing it.

You can also customize your links, pages and edit CSS. Mobify also supports DNS redirects. This means that your mobile site will not lose its URL structure when you use your mobile URL (e.g.: http://m.yoursite.com). Mobify.me users are also provided with a JavaScript snippet that detects mobile devices which will drive mobile users to your mobile URL.

Mobile site (if it exists at all) is separate in terms of content management flow and URL structure, creating SEO challenges. Unless a site has a dedicated tech team or is using a framework with decent mobile functionality (aside from WordPress, there isn’t many), this is difficult.

Developing a mobile presence is a lot of work. Device detection, image resizing, content syncing… Mobile used to be difficult. Mobifying a complete site takes from 5 minutes (a blog) to several hours (a complex portal like TechVibes).

Tags: Design, Mobify, mobile, mobile phone, website

Check your IP Neighbors

Most self hosted blogs and websites are on shared IP hosting. This means that you are sharing an IP address or one machine with several other sites. If you would like to check you IP neighbors there are online tools which will allow you to do that.

AbouThiSite is one of those web services which give you information about a website. It will give you the usual general information like IP address, owner, daily visitors, pagerank and language used. AbouThiSite will also give you information about where the site is hosted and the location of the host including the country and city of the server. It even displays the longitude and latitude of the server the website is installed along with a map. It is totally unnecessary but it’s still good to know. The service can also be used to check if a website does not comply with W3C standards.

AbouThiSite displays in list the domains which are hosted with the website that you are checking out. You can see the list on the lower left corner of the page. On the right side will be a form in which you can preview the IP neighbors of the website.

Tags: aboutthissite, Blog, IP, shared-hosting, shared-ip, website

PrintWhatYouLike Lets you Choose What to Print

We all know that printing a webpage is very easy to accomplish. But what if you like to print a portion of that page and omit the unnecessary elements that you don’t need? Sometimes, you will only need the text and some images and not the ads that are included in the webpage. There is a simple online tool which helps you to do just that.

PrintWhatYouLike simply does that for you. Whenever you need to print a webpage, you can format it right on your browser and not use/open a document editor. To use PrintWhatYouLike, just head over to their site and place the URL of the webpage you wish to edit and print. Take away the parts that you don’t need. You can do the selection by simply clicking on the part. Clicking on the selected part will unselect the item. In PrintWhatYouLike, the modified page will only be printed and nothing more.

This is a great webapp which works faster than copying the whole webpage and editing it in Word. You’ll be able to save time, ink and paper by removing images and pieces of the website that are irrelevant to you.

Tags: online tool, print, printwhatyoulike, web app, website

Compare the Loading Speed of your Blog with Others

Timing the page load of your blog/site is important for optimization. You can test if there is an error in your site depending on how long it takes to load. You can also find out which widget installed in your site makes the loading slower. You can see it below your Firefox browser as your site loads. If a widget takes too long to load, chances are that its host is having problems. If it does not get resolved immediately and have been doing it for days, maybe it’s time for you to remove it.

WebSlug is a web service which helps you to measure the loading time of websites or blogs. You can do comparisons or test your site alone. There is also a list of fastest loading websites and the slowest. Unfortunately it does not give out detailed information on which part of your website loads the slowest of fastest. It would be great if it can dish out some stats to better optimize your site. That being said, it’s still a great tool for checking your sites loading time and compare it with others. This way, if your site takes too long to load, maybe you should think about optimizing your site by checking for errors and removing unnecessary widgets and plugins that makes your site crawl.

Tip: You can also use the FireBug Firefox extension to check your site for errors.

The information about WebSlug is contributed by one of our readers. Thanks to Kimble of GreenerDesktop for sharing WebSlug.

Tags: Blog, loading, website, webslug

Get Website Information Using QuarkBase

QuarkBase is a free online tool that you can use to find information about a website. It’s a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc.

It’s a great tool if you want to know more about a website without going from page to page to gather information. You can easily find out which framework the website is using and where it is hosted. Other useful information is also available such as description and contact information. You can also use QuarkBase to look for similar and related sites to the one you are viewing. It’s also great for viewing the number of Feedburner subscribers if the owner chooses not to show it in his/her blog.

There a many services that you can use to get information about a website and QuarkBase is just one of them. You might also want to check out Cubestat which estimates a website’s worth and shows other information about that website plus a traffic ranking other than Alexa.

Tags: information, quarkbase, website

CubeStat: How Much is your Website Worth?

CubeStat is a web app which computes and estimates the worth of a website/blog plus a lot more. It gives details on the website’s traffic, daily ad revenue, rankings, indexed pages and other information about a particular website.

I don’t know how accurate CubeStat is because the only way to determine a site’s worth is if someone is willing to pay a certain amount to acquire a particular website. That being said, it’s still pretty cool to check out how much your/other website is worth according to CubStat’s computations. It’s like one of those Technorati “How much is your blog worth?” thing that people place on their blogs. The only difference is that CubeStat’s computation is based on different stats and rankings.

Aside from the actual worth estimation of CubeStat, you can use it in checking your/others site ranking. You can find out how many backlinks and indexed pages a website has. You can also find out the age of a website including the expiration date. CubeStat is a neat tool for checking all those stats in one place. You don’t have to go to different websites and check your stats manually.

Tags: cubestat, rank, stats, website