Nibbler – it’s alive!
We’re truly chuffed to announce the launch today of Nibbler, our free tool for testing websites.
Nibbler is a free, cut-down version of SiteRay, but designed to be useful and fun by itself. It takes a 5 page sample of any website and rates it for a tonne of criteria, covering accessibility, SEO and social networking among others. We even tell you how dated your website looks: fear the words “your website is sooo 1995”.
We’re still in alpha right now, which means stuff may break, and we know it. In our defence, if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. If you find something, please let us know via the Feedback tab.
Nibbler is the long term descendant of Sitescore, a free tool we released many years ago but couldn’t keep online due to immense demand. Since then our technology has got a lot better – Nibbler has been designed to run on the cloud and should cope far better with the squillions of users we hope will one day be using it.
This wouldn’t have been possible without a wonderful team of hyper-motivated and super-smart individuals, with particular thanks to Greg Heafield, Jake Noble, Andy Waite, Tim Unwin, Alison Springall, Ben Roberts and everyone who supported them. Thanks guys, you’re awesome.
[...] Take a look and tell us what you think! You can learn more on their brand new sexy blog. [...]
What’s your robot’s user agent?
I’m not sure myself, but I’ve posted your question on our Feedback system here: http://getsatisfaction.com/silktide/topics/what_is_nibblers_user_agent
If you check that later I’m sure someone will answer it for you!
Hi webado
We are using “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3″
Ok, so no distinct user-agent.
Then what is the IP it’s crawling from. I will need to enable that because my site blocks anything that looks like a proxy.
I think there’s a problem with cacheing pages previously fetched, thus no new access takes place even after a change has been made.
Hello,
I used Sitescore many years ago and i think that was the best tool for testing websites with which ever met. It’s nice that now is Nibller. Thank you.
Greetings from Poland
Riu
Nibbler complains about no feeds being found, but ignores at the same time ATOM feeds (and therefor fudges the score). People, RSS is not the only feed format. Heck, ATOM even is an actual Web standard and RSS is just a bunch of incompatible formats.
There are also various other things lowering the score. E.g., if a site uses no Nibbler-visible analytics tool, don’t penalize it. Not to mention that many users see tracking tools like Google Analytics as a *bad* thing, so the report should probably reflect it *that* way.
Fix things like this, please, or your service can’t be taken serious.
For the last anonymous poster: the ATOM comment is a fair point and we’ll add it to our list. Remember we’re still adding things like this constantly, we never claimed Nibbler is ready for mainstream use yet – quite the opposite.
As for Analytics, that’s more complex. The test itself has value, i.e. it is useful to know that visible Analytics is being used or not (especially as Javascript-based analytics is required for some types of user behaviour analysis, that weblog analysis isn’t capable of). For most casual users, for instance, not making use of say Google Analytics is a rookie mistake. For most of our corporate clients, omitting Analytics means someone isn’t doing their job properly.
However, that’s not the contentious part. The issue here is your numeric summary score is being affected by what that test reports, i.e. you’re being penalised for something you argue isn’t relevant.
It depends in part what meaning you give to the overall score. For Nibbler, we have a pretty basic summary system – anything we test is simply either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, so there’s not much room for context. Future versions will be more like SiteRay, with tests affecting specific summary criteria (e.g. ‘marketing’ or ‘accessibility’) differently. In this case, the Analytics test would probably affect your ‘Marketing’ score, but your overall score would be comparatively unaffected.
Also – we can’t do this for Nibbler, but in SiteRay we might ask users whether they have a good reason for ignoring Analytics, or using their own proprietary solution (e.g. like Facebook and Google do). If we did this for Nibbler you’d have no consistency in scoring.
I hope this makes some sense, thanks for the feedback.
This is really fun tool. Since I found silktide score, webagogo (rip now), basic website review, raven seo test, sakui web validator, and now nibbler.
Based on nibbler algorithm, should we have a meta description tags for a tags or categories archive pages?