Author: Michael
Date: October 3, 2008 at 3:32 pm

I was supposed to write the Delicious Day post for last week, but I got busy so here it is Friday and I’m just getting it out.  Over a week late.  Sorry about that, gentle readers.

I do have two great services to cover so hopefully that will make up for my tardiness.  I’m going to cover Browsershots, a free alternative to BrowserCam and Total Validator, an (X)HTML validator with more features than the standard W3C Validator.

First let’s talk about Browsershots.  In the kick off Delicious Day entry, I covered BrowserCam which is a commercial service that helps web designers see how their designs are rendered across various platforms.  BrowserCam is a great service, but it isn’t free.  I came across Browsershots which provides a similar service for free.

To use the service, simply open up the Browsershots home page and enter a URL and specify the browsers you’d like the site rendered in.  Browsershots will then take you to the “job page” where it gives you information about how long your queue wait time will be.  There is no e-mail option so you have to keep refreshing the page until it has completed the rendering in all of the selected browsers.  It does give you the option to download all of the rendered images in a ZIP file which is wonderful.

The job experation time is 30 minutes, but sometimes the queue delay is longer than 30 minutes so you have to click Extend to get more time.  There is a cap on the number of jobs you can submit per day, but if you complete the free registration I believe you can submit an unlimited number of jobs.

Browsershots does not include the actual back end VNC access that is available with BrowserCam so it is not as useful for testing interactive/AJAX applications.  But Browsershots is a great tool to see if your stylesheet rendered presentation is consistent across a variety of browsers, and the price can’t be beat.

Their service works by volunteers allowing their computers be used as rendering engines, similar to the SETI@Home model.  If you’re feeling altruistic, you may want to sign up to use your spare computer time for job processing.

The other service I’m going to mention is Total Validator.  It is an (X)HTML validation service, similar to the standard W3C Validator but with more features.  To quote from their site:

Total Validator is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like.

They also offer a Java based desktop validation tool that can be used to validate pages before actually putting them on the web.

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Categories: Delicious Day