We come across many different sites every single day. And every site uses quite a sizeable number of web technologies to perform various operations on themselves and also to provide a pleasant experience to the users. For example, sites may use widgets to enhance user experience on a site while using various tracking tools for internal monitoring of the site’s statistics.

Sometimes you may find some interesting feature on a website and wonder what the site uses to deliver such a feature to you. Now, using a service called BuiltWith, you are able to find details about every single technology that powers any given website of your choice.

What BuiltWith actually does is to gather information about the website you specify and displays everything to you in a clean and well organized manner. The various categories on which it retrieves information is given below.

• Analytics and Tracking:

Gives info about the tracking software used on the website like Google Analytics, 103Bees, MyBlogLog etc.

• Widgets

Gives info about widgets like Snap Preview, Digg buttons and so on.

The other details include:

• The Web Server on which the site is hosted, like IIS or Apache and the OS on the server, if possible
• The stats from sites like Alexa, Compete, Quantcast etc.
• Javascript Libraries used
• Blog publishing platform used
• The framework, such as PHP or ASP that is being used
• The aggregators used, like RSS, Atom and so on
• The document info, such as xHtml, CSS, JS
• Encoding that the site uses and also the place where it is hosted (this does not seem to be working well)

Apart from all these details, BuiltWith provides you with the percentage of the 5000 major profiled sites that use these widgets or tracking software that is used by the site you queried about. Also, you get examples of other popular sites that use these technologies as well.

The site is amazingly fast even if you want to evaluate the profile of a website for the very first time. For subsequent requests, the site profile is retrieved from cache.

The site simply checks for substrings for every technology that is being used on a site. For example, it checks for the default analytics code to verify if the site uses Analytics. If the site uses any other way of implementing Analytics, then BuiltWith may not detect it.

Thus there are a few flaws in this tool, but overall, I must say that this is a very useful tool for developers and tech enthusiasts alike. This service was launched only a week ago and I am sure that it will find a lot of takers sooner than later. Try out this service and do tell me how it worked for you. Thanks for reading!

PopUri is a simple service that enables you to check up on quite a lot of information regarding your site with a single stop. Thus, this will save you the time to visit different sites to get the rankings, ratings, no. of backlinks and so on.

The various details you can check up using Popuri include the following:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Compete Rank
• Quantcast Rank
• Google BackLinks
• Yahoo BackLink
• Live Search BackLinks
• Technorati Links
• del.icio.us Bookmarks
• Bloglines subscribers
• WHOIS
• DNS Report

All the details that are presented are done live and the results obtained instantly. So, only the latest information is available here. Also, the various results are produced using AJAX, so there is no reloading of the page. It is essential that you enter the site’s name with the http:// . Otherwise the service works just about fine.

One other thing was that, the service did not show the Quantcast rank for my site, while it did show for others. I wonder why that was so. And yes, my site does have a Quantcast rank. It did show the rank as 0 for sites with no rank at Quantcast as well.

Widgets:

Popuri offers two widgets that can be used on your site to display a few vital stats. They include the Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank and backlinks from Yahoo! and Technorati. The only difference between the 2 widgets is the color. No extra functionality or additional details can be added to the widgets. But they do look good enough to put on your site and it functions pretty well.

Here are the samples:

Do tell me your opinions on the service and if you found it useful. Send in your comments about the post. Thanks for reading!

Whether people know or don’t know entirely about web 2.0, the buzz seems to be on all the time. And with new startups deciding to go the web 2.0 way, more and more products seem to be naming themselves after some sort of a so-called web 2.0 standard. Examples include flickr, kontactr, zoomr and so on.

So, in case you are not so eager to think up a name for your web 2.0 site, then here is a handy service that generates a random web 2.0 name that you can use. Note that these web 2.0 names may not be actually available, but they will probably provide you with ideas that you can build on.

Here are a bunch of random names generated from the service:

• Genix
• Divanyx
• Wikita
• Jumpfeed
• Chatfly
• Kaynyx
• Abando
• Babblebug
• Digitype
• Jaloo
• Fatz
• Chatterlinks
• Buzztags
• FeedZ

If you can pickup any names for your website, then goodluck to you. But I frankly think that there are a lot of untapped web 2.0 names here and some of which are actually good to listen and spell.

Please do post your comments about the Web 2.0 Name Generator.