While I am on the subject of useful OS X web development software I wanted to let you know about a cool “Xenu’s Link Sleuth” alternative (LS is a popular windows based link checker). On OS X their isn’t a lot of choice, however we only need one and “Integrity” provides all of the features we need.
I can tell ‘Integrity’ to not follow a paticular URL string, I can tell it to follow a paticular URL string etc. The results page can then be browsed for missing links (of course) and exported to a CSV file for further analysis…. Simple but effective!
As I’ve mentioned previously I am an advocate of PNG images (Portable Network Graphics). It supports 24bit colour and greyscale, but even more importantly, its lossless and supports 8bit transparency. I often use this transparency feature to create logos or banners (See wikipedia for more details).
However one thing I noticed was that they can be considerably larger than GIF or JPG images… significantly larger; but this can be easily rectified. I run OS X, so I don’t have an opinion on any windows apps, but
PNG Crusher
is brilliant at taking PNGs and recompressing them. All you do is drop and drag your file and PNG performs its magic. For example:
40Kb before compression
28Kb after compression
This was quite a complex image, on something as simple as a logo I’ve seen a reduction in size 9x times over (8Kb from 72Kb). This dramatic decrease in size will help my site to load faster, reduce the bandwidth required by myself and the user. Efficient!
Ok, but of a blog entry here, no real code, just some stuff that’s been rolling around my bored little mind… Each day I find myself using three tools more and more.
These 3 free powerful programs break down just about every useful piece of information I could possibly need, even now I am still only scraping the potential of these programs (especially ‘analytics’). But with them I can see is visiting my site, where they came from, I can see if they left the site immediately, how many pages they visited… etc etc.
Imagine what google is going to be able to do when AI kicks off, with all this information and statistics (not to mention access to anything and everything that isn’t made secure)… that is a scary thought!
