Posts Tagged ‘debugging’

There are some great online tools for validating that your website is looking and working well. Of course there are loads of these and many of them we’ve been using for years. Below though, I’ve listed a few I’ve been using the most in recent times or that are often overlooked.

W3C validator

An oldie but a goodie. The W3C validator ensures that your mark-up is valid. This is good for two reasons. One, it will find any problems, missing closing, tags, etc, that may be causing weird problems. Two, it will also point out stuff that you could be doing better like semantic tags and relevant meta tags.

http://validator.w3.org/

Mobile friendly checker

Google are starting to crack down on websites that do not consider mobile users. Of course we all know we should be building mobile friendly websites, indeed, it should be mobile first these days! But it is hard to debug sometimes, especially given the fragmentation of devices.

Luckily Google now provides a tool that will give you a pass and fail, as well as showing you a preview of the site on an Android device. It’s not perfect, sometimes it fails to load assets and you have to come back later, but it is still an awesome tool.

https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Google Developers testing tool

Over on the Leeds Restaurant Guide we expose our reviews using the hreview schema. This means that sites like Google can see what ratings we give restaurants and put them directly in the search results. To check it is working correctly, you can use Google’s testing tool.

https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Facebook Debugger

Recently I wrote about the Open Graph protocol which allows you to tell social networks (mostly Facebook) what titles, images and descriptions you want it to use when sharing a web page.

Facebook have a debugging tool to test your tags are working.

https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/

Here is how to install APD (Advanced PHP Debugger) on CentOS 5. Lets start by creating a directory for it to log files to.

cd /tmp
mkdir apd
chown apache:apache apd

We need to remove ioncube, or it will cause errors.

rpm -e php-ioncube-loader

Now we can install APD, via PECL.

pecl install apd

Add the following to php.ini.

[apd]
zend_extension=/usr/lib64/php/modules/apd.so
apd.dumpdir=/tmp/apd
apd.statement_tracing=0

My PHP binary was in a different location, so I had to alter the script too.

cd /usr/bin/
vim pprofp

Change /usr/local/bin to /usr/bin and save the file.

You also need to ensure PEAR is in your include path (/usr/share/pear) for the script to work.