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Bit of a Nibble

As part of my website testing phase I encountered a great little testing platform called Nibbler which is the free part of the main service offered by Silktide.

The test itself is great, and spans areas such as content filtering, URLs and RSS feeds alongside the more usual tests like image alt text and W3C compliance.

There were a couple of parts of the test which I didn't totally agree on being made part of the final score, which were the Google Analytics inclusion and usage of RSS feeds. Missing out either or both of these had a negative impact on the final score. I had previously added the Google analytics, to test it's findings against my own-built system, but I don't think it's fair to be penalised for preferring mine over Googles' system, especially as mine gives real-time statistics as opposed to ones on a 24-hour delay. Also, RSS feeds are not an essential part of all websites. I must admit, that my site could have done with one a while ago, and the test did spur me into knocking an automatic one up for my blog, but for many sites the Nibbler score will not reflect the true nature of the site if they are missing a feed.

On the plus side, the tests it runs are quite thorough, and a nice feature is the content filtering aspect of it, which incidentally flagged up my articles section because the main page included both the words "model" and "portfolio".

Overall, the Nibbler test is great for getting a good impression of your site. It only tests a small number of pages in any one test, so for larger sites you're better off paying for the full service to test everything. For anyone who is interested, I managed to get an impressive 9.4 out of 10, which you can see on the Nibbler report page for www.ashleysheridan.co.uk.