Category: Utility

History of apple.com – updated for 2017

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Utility

Matraex has been tracking apple.com home page look over the last 17 years.

We created a quick browser which allows you to browse through each of the years.

Check it out here

WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas

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Utility

When working with WordPress websites, there are three main areas we assess within the first few seconds, speed, security and exposure. To help us quickly do this, we built a tool, WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas, which pulls this information quickly and puts it into a single interface.

WordPress Website Check – https://www.matraex.com/website-check.php

While each of the three areas of speed, security and exposure go much deeper than this small scan, we are able to see some very important metrics very quickly.

Three Checks

Speed

We can see the download speed,  the size of your home page,  the number of external CSS files and the number of external scripts.   This helps us to see how well the site has been optimized.  Typically wordpress websites are made up of a Theme with enabled capabilities,  as well as a number of plugins.  Each of the capabilities and plugins will often have their own stylesheets and script files which can add up to a bloated website.

Security

WordPress websites are the subject of frequent hack attempts.  Website scanners quickly find WordPress sites that have their admin and login scripts exposed.  The scanner identifies the scripts.  If the scripts do not block access after a number of failed attempts (with the username ‘admin’ and then with a random username)  the script fails.

Exposure

WordPress websites often publish their version number as well as details about which plugins it uses.  This information ideally is private and if possible should be kept private.  When vulnerabilities in these tools are found,  this is an advertisement to exploit your site.

The results can be saved and a link will be sent to your email so you can permanently have access to the results

The tool is our way of checking a site within seconds,  and we offer it free.   Our hope is that others find this useful ad will come to Matraex, Inc for their Website Development, Design, Hosting and Security needs.

Matraex, Inc
208.344.1115

 

 

Website Performance Assessment Tool

Posted on | updated:
Utility

Webpage performance is important and there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to see your website’s performance.

The tools give a large amount of information and website owners can use that information to make assessments and improvements.

As we use these tools to help our clients improve the performance of their websites, we found a couple of needs:

  • We needed a tool to quickly compare the results between changes
  • We needed somewhere we could go to quickly lookup results next time that we evaluated the performance

So,  we built the Website Performance Assessment Tool (matraex.com/website-performance).

This tool allows us to:

  1. Enter a web page url
  2. Link to two third party performance tools(pingdom,PageSpeed)
  3. Enter the results and
  4. Save

The numeric results are then stored in a table and as we make changes we can see how performance improves.

With a couple of enhancements (the ability to track multiple urls and an improved User Interface) we decided to make this tool public and encourage others to use it.

The primary benefits we see are:

  • The ability for non technical users to track their site performance
  • Website owners can track and evaluate changes made by their website developer
  • Website developers and website owners can use the tool to communicate performance expectations and results

Here is one example of how it can work:

  • A website owner opens the website assessment performance tool and enters their website url
  • They use the quick links to generate metrics for a Performance Grade, Number of Requests,  Load time, Page size and a Desktop and Mobile Grade
  • They enter the metrics into the tool and click Save
  • They notice that the total Load time is more than 4 seconds so they ask their website developer to improve the results.
  • Specifically they describe they want:
    • the Load Time to decrease to less than 2 seconds and
    • the Desktop and Mobile Grade should improve to better than 85% each
  • The developer makes changes and tells the owner the changes are complete.
  • The owner opens the Performance Tooland re enters the metrics and evaluates whether it is true.
  • One month later the owner comes back to the tool and checks again and can see the history and whether performance has degraded.

 

Utility – Bulk Convert the Unix Timestamp in log messages To a Readable Date

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Utility

I have often run into the need to convert a large list of timestamps from Unix Timestamp to a readable date.

Often times this is simply a need that I have when receiving an error message from a server,  or when reviewing log files which only use Unix Timestamps.

So I created a simple utility,  just paste in your text from the log file,   the utility will search out the string for timestamps listed as the first part of each line,  and convert the timestamp to a date.

While this might be useful at some point as an automated process,  for now I just use it when I need it.

I am documenting the tool here with a link for myself (or any one else that may need it) so that it is simple to find.

https://www.matraex.com/batch-timestamp-to-date.php

Possible future upgrades to this utility will likely search out Unix Timestamps anywhere in the text and convert them,  instead of just at the first of the line.

DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool

Posted on | updated:
Utility

Over the years, as we have worked with setting up Nameservers with A records we have found that it can be a rather complex task. So we made a DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool.

The work of configuring the servers is straight forward (we prefer to work with Bind on Ubuntu). We have come up with ways of automating the configuration in order to manage the large numbers of domains our Name Servers handle. However when an issue comes up it can take a considerable amount of time to identify differences between the servers.

The time that it takes for records to propagate throughout the internet and simultaneous whois record updates can add confusion.

So,  we came up with the Nameserver Results Compare Tool.

  1. Enter Nameserver 1  and Nameserver 2
  2. Enter a list of domain names
  3. Review the results with discrepancies highlighted

The link to the tool is here:

https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare.php

Some other uses of the tool:

  • Know whether a new Nameserver correctly reports all of your domain names,  before you put it in production
  • Compare googles 8.8.8.8 Nameserver results against your own.
  • Identify when a recursive name server is caching the results in stead of requesting them from the authoritative source

As of this writing,  the tool is new.   If it is anything like the Bulk MX and DNS Lookup Tool we will likely add new features as we find new uses for it.

Some of the potential new features we could see for the future:

  • Add multiple additional name servers
  • Save frequently used name servers
  • Add different record types (MX, TXT, CNAME)
  • Control and report on the recursive portion of the request
  • Track the comparison history

If you find this tool to be useful,  please do provide a review for us.  If you think of an enhancement that could make this DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool even more useful,  please let us know (email: dnsutil @ matraex.com )

Custom network tools we use at Matraex

Posted on
Utility

We had a need for some Network Tools and we could not find them, so we created them

As Matraex has been developing websites over the last 15+ years, we have used many tools to do it.
We often find areas which there are no tools, or we could automate time consuming or error prone tasks in order to get them done more quickly and efficiently.

For these areas, we have developed some Network Tools which help us to get what we need done.

DNS and Name Servers

Bulk DNS Lookup

One of areas we identified was when dealing with new customers with a large number of domains. In ideal situations, the domains would all be registered with a single registrar account and all using known name servers. However that has not always been the case. We built the Bulk MX, DNS Domain Lookup tool to help us quickly assess the domain name,  where it is located,  who hosts the Name Servers,  domains and mail services.

Name Server Compare

In other cases we found that we needed help in identifying where multiple name servers is not set to the same value on different servers.  For example if a domain uses three different name servers,  there are times  that those name servers many not be setup the same and may report different values.

For this we built the https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare-tool/

This is especially useful when moving a number of domains from one name server to another.

Website Performance

Website Performance Assessment Log

To help us track the performance increase (or decrease) for Websites we built the Website Performance Assessment Log.   The tool has very little functionality itself,  however it allows you to type in statistics from Pingdom and from Google’s PageSpeed  Insights,   then once you make changes to your site you can type in the next set of statistics.   This is helps to track which changes made a difference and which changes did not.

WordPress Website Check

We needed to quickly be able to assess a new WordPress website.  So we built the Website Check tool which grabs some quick speed and page load statistics,   does some security checks and checks on what your WordPress site exposes.

Other less popular,  but some times helpful tools,

  • Our buik – unix time to date converter.  You can paste in a block of text (typically I copy this from some syslog file which logged in unix timestamps) and the tool replaces any found timestamps to help us quickly read the results with Date/ Time stamps

Matraex Inc has other tools as well and we try to offer these tools free (within reason) in order to allow others to do the same thing we do.

Matraex Builds Responsive Websites

Posted on | updated:
UtilityWebsite Design

Matraex Builds Responsive Websites

As a Website Design company here in Boise, we run into customers that have websites which are very difficult, or impossible to use on a mobile device.

Example Output from Mobile Tool

Often times this is because the website is old and needs to be redesigned. In this case we are able to redesign the entire website, and make sure that the new design is responsive and looks good on mobile devices.

Some times though we run into websites which were built where the website owner just did not think about making the website look good on a mobile device. Sometimes website owners dont even have a mobile device themselves so they do not check that their website has been built responsively.

With all of the reasons above,   we found a need to be able to quickly check how things looked on a mobile device.   So we build a tool which shows what the mobile responsive site looks like.

The ‘On A Mobile’ Tool

  • A user can see what their site looks like on a mobile device
  • It allows a user to enter their website and it pulls the website up sized as it would be on a a mobile phone.
  • The tool emulates a resolution 320 x 480 and fits the screen size into a mobile phone frame to complete the picture.

The full URL to the tool is:

  • https://www.matraex.com/onamobile.php

Much like our other free website and DNS and domain tools,  Matraex, offers this tool for free for others to use.

We added a couple of links to the tool which will allow others to share the results they get,  and then if the person viewing their website would like some help fixing issues on the website.   We have a quick form they can fill out so they can request help with it.

A couple of features we would like to add to this tool if people find it useful

  • Automatically generate and save an image
  • Allows the image to be shared by facebook
  • Create a service which automatically emails the mobile image to the website owner once per month to make sure they are aware of what it looks like over time
  • Compare tool,  which shows the full website next to the mobile website

Matraex builds responsive websites services nationwide from our humble offices here in Boise, Idaho.

Custom network tools we use at Matraex

Posted on | updated:
Quick Web UtilitiesUtilityWebsite Performance

We had a need for some Network Tools and we could not find them, so we created them

As Matraex has been developing websites over the last 15+ years, we have used many tools to do it.
We often find areas which there are no tools, or we could automate time consuming or error prone tasks in order to get them done more quickly and efficiently.

For these areas, we have developed some Network Tools which help us to get what we need done.

DNS and Name Servers

Bulk DNS Lookup 

One of areas we identified was when dealing with new customers with a large number of domains. In ideal situations, the domains would all be registered with a single registrar account and all using known name servers. However that has not always been the case. We built the Bulk MX, DNS Domain Lookup tool to help us quickly assess the domain name,  where it is located,  who hosts the Name Servers,  domains and mail services.

Name Server Compare

In other cases we found that we needed help in identifying where multiple name servers is not set to the same value on different servers.  For example if a domain uses three different name servers,  there are times  that those name servers many not be setup the same and may report different values.

For this we built the https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare-tool/

This is especially useful when moving a number of domains from one name server to another.

Website Performance

Website Performance Assessment Log

To help us track the performance increase (or decrease) for Websites we built the Website Performance Assessment Log.   The tool has very little functionality itself,  however it allows you to type in statistics from Pingdom and from Google’s PageSpeed  Insights,   then once you make changes to your site you can type in the next set of statistics.   This is helps to track which changes made a difference and which changes did not.

WordPress Website Check

We needed to quickly be able to assess a new WordPress website.  So we built the Website Check tool which grabs some quick speed and page load statistics,   does some security checks and checks on what your WordPress site exposes.

Other less popular,  but some times helpful tools,

  • our CSS helper tool,  this tool helps us identify duplicate and overriding style sheet definitions on a single style sheet.
  • Our buik – unix time to date converter.  You can paste in a block of text (typically I copy this from some syslog file which logged in unix timestamps) and the tool replaces any found timestamps to help us quickly read the results with Date/ Time stamps

Matraex Inc has other tools as well and we try to offer these tools free (within reason) in order to allow others to do the same thing we do.

DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool

Posted on | updated:
DNSUtility

DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool

Over the years, as we have worked with setting up Nameservers with A records we have found that it can be a rather complex task. So we made a DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool.

The work of configuring the servers is straight forward (we prefer to work with Bind on Ubuntu). We have come up with ways of automating the configuration in order to manage the large numbers of domains our Name Servers handle. However when an issue comes up it can take a considerable amount of time to identify differences between the servers.

The time that it takes for records to propagate throughout the internet and simultaneous whois record updates can add confusion.

So,  we came up with the Nameserver Results Compare Tool.

  1. Enter Nameserver 1  and Nameserver 2
  2. Enter a list of domain names
  3. Review the results with discrepancies highlighted

The link to the tool is here:

https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare.php

Some other uses of the tool:

  • Know whether a new Nameserver correctly reports all of your domain names,  before you put it in production
  • Compare googles 8.8.8.8 Nameserver results against your own.
  • Identify when a recursive name server is caching the results in stead of requesting them from the authoritative source

As of this writing,  the tool is new.   If it is anything like the Bulk MX and DNS Lookup Tool we will likely add new features as we find new uses for it.

Some of the potential new features we could see for the future:

  • Add multiple additional name servers
  • Save frequently used name servers
  • Add different record types (MX, TXT, CNAME)
  • Control and report on the recursive portion of the request
  • Track the comparison history

If you find this tool to be useful,  please do provide a review for us.  If you think of an enhancement that could make this DNS Nameserver Response Comparison Tool even more useful,  please let us know (email: dnsutil @ matraex.com )

Website Performance Assessment Tool Store Compare Page Speed Size Grade

Posted on | updated:
Quick Web UtilitiesUtilityWebsite Performance

Webpage performance is important and there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to see your website’s performance.

The tools give a large amount of information and website owners can use that information to make assessments and improvements.

As we use these tools to help our clients improve the performance of their websites, we found a couple of needs:

  • We needed a tool to quickly compare the results between changes
  • We needed somewhere we could go to quickly lookup results next time that we evaluated the performance

So,  we built the Website Performance Assessment Tool (matraex.com/website-performance).

This tool allows us to 1) Enter a web page url 2) Link to two third party performance tools(pingdom,PageSpeed) 3) Enter the results and 4) Save

The numeric results are then stored in a table and as we make changes we can see how performance improves.

With a couple of enhancements (the ability to track multiple urls and an improved User Interface) we decided to make this tool public and encourage others to use it.

The primary benefits we see are:

  • The ability for non technical users to track their site performance
  • Website owners can track and evaluate changes made by their website developer
  • Website developers and website owners can use the tool to communicate performance expectations and results

Here is one example of how it can work:

  • A website owner opens the website assessment performance tool and enters their website url
  • They use the quick links to generate metrics for a Performance Grade, Number of Requests,  Load time, Page size and a Desktop and Mobile Grade
  • They enter the metrics into the tool and click Save
  • They notice that the total Load time is more than 4 seconds so they ask their website developer to improve the results.
  • Specifically they describe they want:
    • the Load Time to decrease to less than 2 seconds and
    • the Desktop and Mobile Grade should improve to better than 85% each
  • The developer makes changes and tells the owner the changes are complete.
  • The owner opens the Performance Tool and re enters the metrics and evaluates whether it is true.
  • One month later the owner comes back to the tool and checks again and can see the history and whether performance has degraded.