Adding additional web addresses are very useful when analysing a specific subdirectory or auditing a site whilst still in development.

From your Dashboard, click "Your web addresses", then "Add new web address" at the base of the left hand column.

You will now be prompted to enter a URL to test, such as:

• www.example.com
• www.example.com:1234 - to audit a site whose server is running on a non-standard port
• www.example.com/folder/ - to audit a subdirectory and all of its content. Sitemorse will not test any content above this directory

It is important to note that entering "www.example.com/folder" is the same as "www.example.com" as, in this respect, "/folder" is interpreted to be a file, and not a subdirectory.

URIs of the form "itpc://www.example.com/podcast.xml" are sometimes seen as a shortcut for subscribing to iTunes podcasts.

However, as the "itpc" uri-scheme has not yet been registered with IANA (as described in RFC 4395 "Guidelines and Registration Procedures for New URI Schemes") the URI cannot be guaranteed to work in all browsers.

For this reason "itpc://" URIs fail the Function diagnostic url/fetch/badscheme with the message: "Unknown or unsupported URL scheme 'itpc'"

More information on registered URI schemes:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes.html

Sitemorse clients can supply authentication details for Sitemorse to log into externally accessible Intranets or staff only sites.

We can also provide the IP addresses of our testing servers if you wish to audit an internal resource.

Standards:

• RFC 2965 - HTTP State Management Mechanism
• Netscape "Client Side State - HTTP Cookies" specification

Description:

A web server attempted to set an HTTP "cookie" but its request was invalid. This is usually because an invalid expiry date format was used (the correct format is Wdy, DD-Mon-YYYY HH:MM:SS GMT).

Prior to 15th January 2009 url/fetch/badcookie diagnostic resulted in a Code quality failure, from this date the diagnostic is a Function failure.

Example:

Set-Cookie: CUSTOMER=WILE_E_COYOTE; path=/; expires=Wed, 09 Nov 19 23:12:40 GMT

Thursday 15th January 2009: It's been some considerable time since we last updated the way that scores are calculated. As this affects your ability to compare your site over time and how you stand in any of our surveys that your site might be part of, it is not something we would consider doing on a regular basis.

Reclassification of failures

These items have been changed to the severity of a "Functional" problem (i.e. the system has a low tolerance for these types of problem and they will affect your score)

• "Compromised" (red) email server problems
• Broken "mailto" links
• Pages with no title
• file/html/noframes
• url/fetch/badcookie***

*** url/fetch/badcookie now always counts as a Function problem, but it is not checked on external links, so the issues we encountered with Nedstats, Doubleclick, etc, should be removed

These items have been changed to a lower severity, similar to a "Code Quality" problem (i.e. the system has a higher tolerance for these types of problem and they will have a limited affect on your score)

• "Impaired" (amber) email server problems***
• Pages with no meta "description"
• Other meta-data problems (e.g. longtitle, badmeta, etc)
• "bad character in URL" type problems (e.g. file/url/badpath)

*** the issues we encountered with some email security services such as MessageLabs previously caused scores to be impacted negatively due to the email server configuration on their backup servers being non-standard. The new email service assesses these types of problems as "impaired" rather than "compromised" so the impact on scores will now be negligible.

Performance

We have introduced a new calculation to better represent the actual download speed from a website. The new data shows higher download speeds for most sites.

To take account of this we have increased the speed thresholds in the benchmarks used to calculate the Performance score. Most sites will not see dramatic changes in their Performance scores but when looking at the detail there may be a significant increase in the download speed figure.

Email testing

The new features of the service look at the email server infrastructure behind your email addresses to make sure that they are configured correctly and that the servers will receive emails.

We have come across numerous email server infrastructures that have either been incorrectly defined to DNS or are mis-configured and wont actually receive emails. Email servers can have different roles, e.g. they may be primary servers, secondary servers, load balance servers or fail-over servers. Each would be defined and configured differently.

This adds another layer of sophistication to our audits and ensures that you are confident that your email infrastructure is defined correctly and configured correctly. We'll also report any availability issues or intermittent type problems if they occur during one of your audits.

Site enhancements

The Directory map feature of the Inventory section is now "clickable". By default it loads as a collapsed list of directories, each sub directory can be expanded to display its contents. By making this change we have resolved a problem where sites with a deep directory structure extended off the page.

Based on customer feedback, we have made the font colour on our web site darker, in order to improve readability through greater contrast.

Wednesday 1st October 2008: Sitemorse has today relaunched the spell checker module to greatly increase the number of languages we evaluate.

This initial release includes support for:

• British English ("en-GB")
• American English ("en-US")
• International English ("en")
• Irish ("ga")
• Welsh (both "cy" and "cy-GB")
• French (both "fr" and "fr-FR")
• German (both "de" and "de-DE")
• Spanish (both "es" and "es-ES")
• Dutch ("nl")

To ensure content is evaluated under the correct language Sitemorse fully supports the "lang" attribute of any HTML tag. When the language codes above are encountered the appropriate dictionary is consulted.

Sitemorse fully supports ISO-5589-1 and the appropriate HTML entities for displaying words in the above languages.

Monitor summary data is available to download as a CSV formatted file for offline analysis.

To download the data, start by navigating to the monitor page.

Next From the "Trend Analysis" links underneath the main graph select "This Month".

You can change the reporting period, interval and how the data is averaged on the right hand side.

When ready click, "Download CSV spreadsheet".

Sitemorse monitoring regularly checks your page for changes. If a problem is detected an alert is sent out via email and/or SMS. Features include:

• Unlimited alert recipients
• Personal “thresholds” per recipient – ensure only the relevant people are informed

Sitemorse offers two different monitoring contracts:

Standard clients

• thresholds based on Sitemorse scores and total number of failures

Enterprise clients

• flexible alerting, down to individual tests
• Scaling alerts:
  • Alert different based on the severity of a particular type of problem (e.g. the number of missing links on a page. If one was missing you could alert person “A”. If 5 were missing you could alert person “A” and immediately escalate it to person “B” as well).
• Escalation
  • Definable “delay before alerting”
  • Establish a “chain” by adding a longer delay on additional recipients. If the problem is not resolved the person next up the chain is informed.
• Spell checker integration

Click “add a new alert recipient” on the Monitor page takes you to the page for defining who should be alerted and how.

When setting up an alert recipient you need to establish:

• A method of contact, either email or mobile number
• A name and description

And finally a set of thresholds, which when deviated from cause an alert to be sent

Setting Thresholds - Standard Version

The standard version limits the criteria you can specify. A single page split into the different sections of Function, Accessibility, Code Quality etc allows you to establish the various threshold levels.

If you do not wish to trigger an alert for any specific criteria, simply leave the box blank

Setting Thresholds - Enterprise Version

The Enterprise version breaks down the threshold options over several tabs:

• Summary
• Spelling
• Function
• Accessibility
• Code Quality
• Performance
• Metadata

Setting Thresholds - Summary Tab

The summary tab allows you to set the who, how and when.

Setting Thresholds - Function Tab

In addition to the standard function thresholds at the top, a new table mirroring the Sitemorse report is shown.

Three columns - Internal, External and Total - permit specific thresholds to be set for each test.

For example, to be alerted if four or more external broken links are found, enter 4 in the Ext column of “url/fetch/notfound”.

For the same error it may be more important to know if any internal broken links are found, therefore enter 1 in the Int column of “url/fetch/notfound”.

Similarly it may be desirable to know immediately if a bad URL path is detected, whether internal or external. In that case enter 1 in the Total column of “file/url/badpath”.

The other option tabs present very similar screens for you to define the thresholds.

We have for several years now produced free reports for people that registered on our site but have not subscribed to the Sitemorse Services.

As from the 1st August 2007 we stopped running the free Reports and deleted all the old unpurchased reports stored on our servers.

These reports, on a limited number of pages, gave people an overview of their sites but no access to the detail of any issues. This facility was intended to show people what the Sitemorse Service had to offer.

The number of "free" ran to several thousand reports every month for people that never intend to buy access to the detail.

We will shortly introduce a paid for service where people can pay for an assessment of a Website (covering a greater number of pages than the previous "free" summary). Having reviewed the summary, they can then chose whether to purchase access to the full report.

This is NOT a realistic alternative to a subscription for organisations committed and serious about their Web presence.

If you'd like to discuss our subscription options please feel free to contact us.