inursite…
….validatin’ ur HTMLz
I’ve been working on a side project for awhile, called inursite.com. The basic idea is that you signup, give it a few URLs you care about and it’ll check them about every 24 hours to see if the HTML is valid. You can then get a feed of the results. A simple idea, so simple I’m surprised no one’s done it before.
For now, the site is somewhat limited: you can only have 5 URLs to be checked, and it will only check them on schedule (you can’t force it to update), but I plan on lifting some of these restrictions and adding new types of checks in the future, and there’ll probably be a subscription premium version, too. I releasing this now because I want to get more feedback on the ideas and design.
So, go check it out, then tell me what you think.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
What validator back end is it running?
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Henri-
It’s using a copy of the W3C validator. validator.nu is on the roadmap. :)
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Brilliant. Love the simplicity of it. It’s nearly continuous integration applied to HTML. Makes me think about other similar things that would be useful to your typical front-end web dev.
I did something similar last year for a previous employer based around a local install of the validator, some python scripts and Ant. No front end or feeds to speak off though. I used a spider to first spider the site and then tried to validate all the resulting pages – it was useful but difficult to parse through all the information meaningfully. Not to mention rather slow.
February 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Gareth-
I’m glad you like the site. I have lots of ideas for things I’d like to add, along both the “how do you choose which URLs to check” and “what do you check them for” dimensions. Please let me know what you’d like to see, though.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:00 am
Would not it be something like Nikita the spider? :)
February 4th, 2008 at 2:46 am
OK. It’s nice to have Validator.nu on the roadmap. :-)
February 4th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
[…] The emphasis above is mine, purely as it’s at the heart of what I’m going to ramble on about. A little closer to home Ryan King just posted about a new site; inursite. The premise is simple; enter a few of your sites and inursite will visit them once a day and run a markup validation service over the page. You then get a feed of the pass or failure status. It’s simple but brilliant. For example, I have this very site added to the service. If I put some invalid markup in this post, tomorrow morning I’ll get an item in my feedreader telling me of my mistake. I’ll get that every day until I fix the problem. […]
February 6th, 2008 at 9:56 am
This is a really great idea. CI for our back end has been of definite benefit to our development team. I hadn’t really thought about how little attention we’ve been paying to the front end until now!
Would it be possible to make a standalone version of this (e.g. for running within an intranet)?