Faster, better cross browser testing with browsershots.org.

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:38:00 GMT

For most web developers it is necessary to test website designs in a number of different browsers and possibly on a PC and a Mac. There are multiple ways this can be done but I think I just found a method that is very convenient and has saved me tons of time, browsershots.org.

My old method

Open pre-configured Virtual PC's
1. Since some browsers can't be installed with others you will need to have multiple virtual PC's
2. For example IE 6 and IE 7 don't work well on the same machine
If I want to take screen shots I would need to do that on each virtual pc and publish to a shared directory.

A few things to note about this method

It takes some time to run all of the reports because you need to open each virtual PC and web browser and type in the page to test.
Screen shots can all be stored together but you need to be consistent in naming since they are not automatically named and you need to refer to the browser version later

My new method

Browse to browsershots.org
Select the browser versions and JavaScript, Java, etc. support
Enter the URL of the site to test
Submit the form and wait for the screen shots.

A few things to note about this method.

Screen shots are only available for 30 min
You could just download the pictures
This only shows you the screen shot it doesn't let you interact with the page.
One submit runs all of the reports in a few minutes this saves huge amounts of time.
If the customer would like to verify that it looks ok, since they may have customers complain, they can view the page to see the differences.

A good XSLT Library of common functions and templates.

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:51:00 GMT

The XSLT Standart Library can be found at http://xsltsl.sourceforge.net/. I recently used version 1.2.1 for an airport flight information data system to format dates and times flights were arriving. The code was simple to use and well documented. It is distributed as a zip file and in order to use it you just need to include a directory with the library in it. In order to keep it simple I named the directory with the version.

The Best Free FireFox Add-ons

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 23:23:00 GMT

FireFox allows the community to develop Add-ons for the FireFox web browser. These Add-ons are distributed freely from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/. I have found some of these Add-ons to be very useful.

Joel Taylor

Faster, better cross browser testing with browsershots.org.

A good XSLT Library of common functions and templates.

The Best Free FireFox Add-ons