slayeroffice - web experiments gone horribly awry

06.09.2004 - Page Info Favelet

Kevin came up with an internal (meaning office network), web based tool the other day that would take a user entered URL, grab it, parse it out and return all sorts of useful information like approximated download time, number of links on the page, number of images, percent of the page that was markup versus content, etc. Kimberly then followed up on the listserv he announced it on with a tool she had written some time ago that would calculate download times and factor in packet loss of varying degrees based on a user entered byte size.

While both of these tools are of great merit on their own rights, I felt like they should be combined. I also felt that their being web pages on our internal network was a handicap, along with them both requiring me to type something in. As any frequent visitor to this site knows, I am very lazy. So very lazy that I can rarely be bothered with anything that takes as many as two or three steps. This is of course no fault on Kimberly or Kevin's applications - this is who I am and I shall deal with it in my own way. This time, that way is a favelet (You probably saw that coming).

I'm calling it the Page Info favelet, and heres the data it will return:

  • Total code weight in bytes.
  • Total <body> code weight in bytes.
  • Total content weight in bytes.
  • Percentage of code that is markup.
  • Percentage of code that is content. (meaning, non-markup)
  • A table of connection speeds with estimated download time, including latency/loss calculations.
  • Link, inline style sheet, style attribute, script element, meta element, image element, table and comment counts, including a byte size of commented markup.

As evidenced by the Color Palette Creator, I am completely open to suggestions for improvement. Speaking of, I released version 1.4 of the Color Palette Creator the other day - you can now define the "blend" colors, rather than just using white and black. It has the potential of creating some terribly unattractive palettes, but I thought it would be a cool thing to implement.

The link once more for the new favelet: Page Info. It has also been added to the Favelet Suite.

Very nice! I have one request -- if there was a way to put the output in a "printer friendly" mode - like throwing it into a textarea or something.
Posted by Andrew Wooldridge on June 15, 2004 @ 4:52 pm

Comments have been closed for this post.