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Showing posts with label Tools. Show all posts
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HOW TO detect unused CSS style definitions

As your web app project & the team size get larger,  there is a chance that the CSS style definitions within the stylesheets grow uncontrollably due to lack of coordination among the developers. This could lead to duplicate style definitions & gradually this could impact web page performance.

Luckily, there are tools to detect unused CSS selectors per page & weed them out manually -

  • Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox Extension (Firefox version 4 is not currently supported) that scans all the definitions inline & within external stylesheets and reports the unused ones.
  • Audit tab within Google Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I) lists unused selectors as part of its performance recommendations 



Also see:
HOW TO cut & paste just the text in a browser, not the formatting
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WebPageTest Tips & Tricks

WebPageTest is a powerful online web performance testing & analysis tool that has been adding a lot of interesting new features.  Their list of test locations to check a page from is growing (currently 17) & now includes Delhi, India. It makes it easy to do "what-if" testing on production pages by showing what performance gains can be achieved by removing ads, widgets, JavaScript. It looks simple on the surface but once you start poking around Advanced Settings & see its analytical review of web pages you test, you'll wonder how it's even free.

I highly recommend this tool to web developers who want to improve performance of the web pages they build.

If you never tried this tool or gone through it superficially, check Patrick Meenan's video to get started and learn directly from the creator of the tool.
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Web Performance Testing - Interpreting a Waterfall Chart

Some native browser Developer tools & external  web performance analysis tools  visualize data that is generated by the series of actions that occur between a user and the server from the time a request is made till it is completely delivered, through HTTP Waterfall charts



Joshua Bixby's Waterfalls 101 article explains in plain-English the parts of the Waterfall chart & how to analyze it.
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools
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Free WebApp Security Testing tools

Performance & Security are non-functional requirements which cannot be taken for granted.

Here's a compilation of Security testing tools for Web apps, drawn from an answer on the Pro WebMasters StackExchange forum & other sources -
Also see:
Web Performance Analysis & Optimization tools
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Add DOM Monster to your collection of Web Perf Analysis & Optimization tools

If you like web page performance analysis & optimization tools like YSlow, you will love DOM Monster (thanks @souders)

"DOM Monster is a cross-platform, cross-browser bookmarklet that will analyze the DOM & other features of the page you're on, and give you its bill of health."

The good thing about this tool is that you wouldn't have to update it when a new version comes out as it is in the form of a bookmarklet.
DOM Monster suggestions for a ASP.NET Forums page (click to enlarge)
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Manipulate PDF files for free with PDFRider
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Manipulate PDF files for free with PDFRider

PDFRider (currently in version 0.5) is an open source project on Codeplex. This utility provides a GUI for the command-line program Pdftk. It can perform the following operations on PDF files -

  • Merge PDF documents 
  • Insert pages from PDF file to another 
  • Extract pages from a PDF document to a new document 
  • Delete pages 
  • Rotate pages 
  • Crypt and Decrypt a PDF file 
  • Burst or split a single, input PDF document into individual pages
I used it to extract summaries of chapters from a PDF eBook & then merge them all together into a mini PDF ebook.

The UI of PDFRider looks amateurish & needs a lot of improvement. I badly missed the keyboard shortcut to save the manipulated files. Considering it's free, open-source & it did the job quickly without errors, I can't really complain though. It felt faster than PDFSAM which I tried a few years ago. 

Also see:
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Google Labs Script Converter Bookmarklet
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Google Labs Script Converter Bookmarklet

Script Converter is a Google Labs product that allows the user to read a web page in a script of their choice (currently 11 Indian languages, English, Greek, Nepali, Persian, Russian, Serbian are supported). For example, if the user can understand spoken Tamil but cannot read the script, they will be able to view Tamil web pages in English (Roman) script or one of the other supported languages.

The online tool does not translate any content but transforms the words on the page to its phonetic equivalent in the desired script. It also supports the conversion from non-Unicode encodings to Unicode, so that users can view pages without installing the custom font otherwise needed.

Any web-based service that takes its required parameters as a querystring is a good candidate for a bookmarklet. Here's the code for my attempt at building a bookmarklet for Google Labs Script Converter -
javascript:(function()
{
window.location.href='http://scriptconv.googlelabs.com/frame?sln=xx&tln=en&url='
+encodeURI(window.location.href);
})()

The value "xx" for sln indicates Script Converter will auto-detect the language on the web page that it has to transform while tln=en means the content will be shown in English.

You can deploy this bookmarklet yourself (after removing the newline characters) or drag the link below to your Bookmarks toolbar (or whatever it is called in your favorite browser)  -
>> Transliterate with Script Converter <<

To test this bookmarklet, you can open the BBC Hindi home page & then click on the above bookmarklet that you've added to view Hindi content in English.

Also see:
The Joy of Bookmarklets
How to read an online PDF file without installing a PDF Reader
HOW to continuously refresh any web-page in IE & Firefox
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Simulate Modem speeds with Fiddler
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Simulate Modem speeds with Fiddler

In the Pluralsight Silverlight 3 Fundamentals video course, the instructor suggests a tip to test a custom progress bar by mimicking a slow web server on the local computer. This can be done by generating modem speeds with Fiddler, a HTTP proxy, using the menu option Rules > Performance > Simulate Modem speeds. The speed can also be customized. This technique is more convenient than using the System.Threading.Thread.Sleep method to create an artifical delay with code.

Firefox Throttle plug-in also allows you to cap download/upload rates and monitor current bandwidth utilization. This plugin seems to be currently removed from the Mozilla add-ons directory but as per this Firefox support Forum its available on the Mozilla FTP server(direct link to .XPI).

Also see:
FiddlerCap makes HTTP Traffic Capture easier
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HOW TO monitor performance and availability status of public APIs & websites
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HOW TO monitor performance and availability status of public APIs & websites

If you use Public APIs (like Bing Search, Google Maps APIs) in your applications, it helps to be aware of performance and availability issues that those services may face.

Thankfully, there are some free tools that monitor popular APIs & websites -
Also see:
How LARGE websites manage performance & scalability
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