REDbot news http://blog.redbot.org Most recent posts at REDbot news posterous.com Wed, 30 Nov 2011 01:29:00 -0800 HTTPS in REDbot http://blog.redbot.org/https-in-redbot http://blog.redbot.org/https-in-redbot

Long overdue, RED now support HTTP over SSL and TLS, thanks to support in Thor, the underlying HTTP library.

For example, try Google.

At the moment, it treats HTTPS just like HTTP, but over time we'll add checks for certificate validity and other HTTPS-specific concerns.

As always, please report any concerns, either using the feedback button on the home page, or in REDbot's issues list.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:49:00 -0700 Content-Disposition and Link http://blog.redbot.org/content-disposition-and-link http://blog.redbot.org/content-disposition-and-link

REDbot now does a number of checks on Content-Disposition headers (RFC6266) and Link headers (RF5988) in responses. It also checks for a number of issues in RFC5987 encoding, where that's used.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:35:00 -0700 Saving REDbot Results, and HAR Support http://blog.redbot.org/saving-redbot-results-and-har-support http://blog.redbot.org/saving-redbot-results-and-har-support

Over the weekend REDbot got a fairly big upgrade; it now supports saving and sharing your results:

Screen_shot_2010-10-06_at_9
When you save your results, they're available at the resulting URL for at least 30 days. 

The new REDbot also allows showing results in HAR, a JSON format:

Screen_shot_2010-10-06_at_9
For example, see the HAR for amazon.com's home page. So, now you can not only get REDbot results in a JSON format (an often-requested feature), but you can also feed them into a HAR viewer such as this one to see how the requests were made. 

Behind the scenes, REDbot is using the 'id' parameter to reference stored results; by default, all results are stored for a short amount of time, so that you can view them in different formats without re-running the tests. Saving them just pushes out the date when they'll be deleted. Different formats can be requested using the 'format' parameter, either with 'id' (as REDbot does for the 'view HAR' link) or directly with the 'uri' parameter (which will re-request everything).

I still have a lot of tweaking to do with the UI; feedback appreciated (as always).

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:21:00 -0700 Command-Line REDbot http://blog.redbot.org/command-line-redbot http://blog.redbot.org/command-line-redbot

Thanks to @jeromerenard, REDbot now has command-line support:

> redbot -r http://www.mnot.net/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Response Headers:
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:08:57 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (Fedora)
Last-Modified: Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:08:24 GMT
ETag: "d87c7-f27-48d7048cb9e00"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3879
Cache-Control: max-age=3600
Expires: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:08:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Language: en
Age: 371
X-Cache: HIT from cloud.mnot.net
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from cloud.mnot.net:80
Via: 1.1 cloud.mnot.net:80 (squid)

General:
One or more intermediaries are present.
The Content-Length header is correct.
The server's clock is correct.

Caching:
The resource last changed 1 week 3 days ago.
This response allows all caches to store it.
This response has been cached for 6 min 11 sec.
This response is fresh until 53 min 49 sec from now.
This response may still be served by a cache once it becomes stale.

Validation:
If-None-Match conditional requests are supported.
If-Modified-Since conditional requests are supported.

Note that a side effect of this is a change in RED's installation procedure; it now has a Pythonic setup.py file. See the README for more information.

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:13:50 -0700 Feedback! http://blog.redbot.org/feedback-318 http://blog.redbot.org/feedback-318 RED now has a little 'feedback' widget on the right-hand side, courtesy of UserVoice. Please leave suggestions and ideas!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:52:15 -0800 RED and IE8 http://blog.redbot.org/red-and-ie8 http://blog.redbot.org/red-and-ie8 I've just pushed a few changes to RED that should fix issues when setting request headers on IE8, as well as make the display easier on the eyes when using that browser. Please tell me (here, or in an issue) if you still see problems.

Also (belatedly; this has been in for a while), RED now checks some IE-specific response headers, including X-UA-Compatible, X-XSS-Protection, and the pre-check and post-check Cache-Control directives.
Have fun.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:13:16 -0700 Now with: response bodies http://blog.redbot.org/now-with-response-bodies http://blog.redbot.org/now-with-response-bodies RED now allows you to see the response body as it did, by clicking "show body":

Screen_shot_2009-10-21_at_10

...which will replace the diagnostic messages with this:

0screen_shot_2009-10-21_at_10

The markup is coloured thanks to Google's code prettifier . Also, note that clicking on a link will run RED against it, replacing the old "show links" function.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:23:13 -0700 Request headers! http://blog.redbot.org/request-headers http://blog.redbot.org/request-headers RED now lets you set common and not-so-common HTTP request headers:

Screen_shot_2009-10-15_at_6

This is especially useful when, for example, you want to check to see if a site treats a specific browser differently, according to the User-Agent header.

When adding headers, keep in mind that RED isn't just a simple HTTP client; it actively probes resources using multiple requests with headers like Accept-Encoding, If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match to see how it will behave. If you try to set any of these headers, RED will warn you.

RED also has changed how it shows you the details of a specific message or header; if you mouse over one, you'll see a bubble like this appear:

Screen_shot_2009-10-15_at_6

The fine details are still being tweaked, so please be patient if you see some bugs here (and, of course, feel free to report them!).

Lots more is coming down the pipeline, stay tuned.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:13:00 -0700 Using RED on a page's assets http://blog.redbot.org/using-red-on-a-pages-assets http://blog.redbot.org/using-red-on-a-pages-assets

The biggest thing that RED has lacked, as compared to the Cacheability Engine, was the ability to test not only one URL, but also all of the linked assets on a Web page (if that URL is HTML).
 
RED can do this now, using the 'check links' option under a page's headers (available when the response is HTML):

Picture_1

When you follow this link, RED will request every image, head and frame link on the page and display a table summarising the results;

Picture_2

The results are hopefully self-explanatory, but you can mouse over the headers for details of what the columns mean. The 'Problems' column shows the 'warning' and 'bad' level messages for each asset, and you can either refer to the bottom of the screen or mouse over the numbers for more details.
 
I'm still tweaking the display of the table; there's a lot of information, but I think it's already better than the CE. Feedback appreciated, as always.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:03:08 -0700 Welcome to RED's blog http://blog.redbot.org/welcome-to-reds-blog http://blog.redbot.org/welcome-to-reds-blog

RED already has a Twitter feed, but that's mostly for the truly geeky -- mostly, it gets a tweet every time code is committed to the repository.

Like I said, geeky.

I wanted to have a channel to announce new features, fixes and other interesting things in; this is it. Soon I'm looking to get it hooked up so the latest post shows up on RED's front page.

Enjoy!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/862252/mnot-sm.jpg http://posterous.com/users/10NggytCyQh Mark Nottingham mnot Mark Nottingham