Get information about a websites underlying technology

Posted on January 15, 2009 at 5:19 am

Like most people, you probably visit a certain number of blogs and websites everyday that you really like, right? Ever wonder how those websites work? What technologies does that website or blog use? What is the underlying software that the website runs on?

These are all good questions and not always easily determined by just viewing a website. A blog like mine could be run by Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Live Journal, or on many other blogging platforms, but you can’t tell by just viewing my website.

What about advertising? What kind of advertising networks does a blog use to make money online? That’s another question that can be hard to answer by just looking at a ad.

Sitonomy is a cool web service that you can use to get information about a website, such as what technology is used to run the website, what advertising the site uses, the programming language for the website, what kind of server it is running on, and lots more.

For example, let’s take a look at the information about my website, online-tech-tips.com:

According to the site, I am running WordPress as my blogging platform! Correct! It also gives you a usage number, which is basically a percentage of other websites analyzed by Sitonomy that use this technology.

For advertising, it also rightly determined that I use Kontera in-text advertising. However, for some reason it did not seem to figure out that I am also using Google AdSense, which I would think would be pretty easy to figure out!

It also figured out that I have a widget on my site to add my RSS feed to your iGoogle page or to Google reader. It was able to see that I have a RSS feed that is managed by FeedBurner, which is in use by almost 50% of other websites too.

I was surprised that it was able to figure out both of the stat tools that I am using on my website, Google Analytics and Quantcast. I’m sure if you are running another site stats tool like SiteMeter, etc, it will also be able to figure that out.

Finally, it also gives me information about the programming language that the site is written in, PHP in my case. Also, it determined that I am running my website off Apache HTTP Server, which is quite popular with blogs.

I think the tool is pretty good, but it could be made significantly better. For example, it should have a way to figure out who is hosting a website and who owns a website domain name.

If it’s a blog, it should be able to give more information about the blog like Website Grader, such as page rank, alexa rank, inbound links, indexed pages, subscriber count, etc.

Overall, though, if you are looking to get a basic idea about the technologies used on a website, this is one of the best tools out there. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Cool Websites

Comments

One Response to “Get information about a websites underlying technology”

Phaoloo said on : January 16th, 2009 at 7:45 pm

Awesome service, I always view source code of a website to grab these information. It’s hard and takes time. Sitonomy does it better.