Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
BuiltWith What Tech?
<>p>BuiltWith is the latest attempt at gathering information about a given URL. It aims to weazel around and find out as much technical information about the site as possible.For example:
- What web server?
- What JavaScript libraries?
- Do they use a CDN?
- What analytics programs do they use?
- What widgets are installed
If you have already looked through your mini-feed on Facebook, and read your email, here is a chance to waste a little time seeing what it can find on your favourite sites. According to the tool itself, it is built with YUI… but of course you could view source for that :)
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3.2 rating from 26 votes
builtwith.com says our websites use PHP, which is wrong. we work with django (=python).
I wasn’t too impressed. I got false positives and false negatives on every site I tested.
One site showed up as using ASP.NET and PHP, but in reality it’s just PHP. The site runs on IIS, which is probably why it showed up as ASP.NET.
For another site it completely failed to detect Flash, even though it detected Adobe’s embed code.
A third site I tested didn’t show up as using JavaScript. I would guess that JavaScript is probably the simplest thing after HTML to detect, just look for the script tag.
Then it’s the hilarious statement: “128.43% of all profiled sites use Cascading Style Sheets.”
I’m moderately impressed that it picks up that mine is rails.
Sadly for “Site Information” it claims “this site hides all this information from passers by”, when my headers clearly claim to be served by something.
It doesn’t pick up that I’m using cachefly, which is easy to pick up (hostnames with .cachefly.net in them) too.
Lastly it claims I’m using mootools, which I’m not on the blog…
It didn’t do too bad of a job. It detected everything I was using although thought I was using some technologies that I wasn’t.
Well yeah…
128.43% of all profiled sites use Cascading Style Sheets.
:D