Tons of Screenshots

Posted on March 6, 2012 and filed under Updates.

AskMyc is churning out website screenshots at an ever-accelerating rate.  For the most popular sites on the web, it is almost certain that AskMyc will have finished a screenshot.

If a screenshot has been completed for any particular website, then a small thumbnail version of that website will appear toward the right hand side of the screen when you are viewing the associated website’s general info page.  If you would like to view a larger version of this site image, then click the thumbnail to be forwarded to a larger view.

Screenshots are generally up to date, and are geared for the “standard” browser width, which is about 1024 pixels.  For this reason, sites that do not adhere to this width when the capture occurs might seem either distorted, or will be partially obscured.

In this way, thanks to AskMyc’s backlog of screenshots, you will be able to view websites’ older versions, and potentially get insight into how often a particular site is updated.  This information can be useful both for standard site visitors as well as site designers (or webmasters).

 

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Find Similar Websites

Posted on March 1, 2012 and filed under Updates.

AskMyc offers the ability to find websites that are similar to other websites according to common keywords.  For example, if you were browsing through the existing profile for engraved-medical-id.com, you could view the list of websites related by keywords, such as  keychains, necklaces, bracelets, jewelry.   Generally, pages displaying related websites are quite extensive — you can view a large list of related sites that were found to have similar concentrations of similar keywords.

As with the rest of websites.askmyc.com, everything is linked to other related resources, such as links that highlight keywords or links that lead to the actual related website records.

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Azure Outage Is Causing an AskMyc.com Outage

Posted on March 1, 2012 and filed under Updates.

Unfortunately AskMyc.com is/was hosted on an Azure instance that was part of a massive outage, which so far has lasted more than 24 hours.  Now that I have confirmed that Microsoft doesn’t even know when they’re “Compute” service in different regions of the U.S., I am in the process of deploying AskMyc and all associated sites in another Azure instance in Asia.  Ugh.

This is a bit disturbing since Azure is supposed to be a cloud-like, high availability service.  I am still a big fan as my experience in general has been stellar so far and the technology is relatively easy to use once you get past the complex / troublesome parts.  I have also tried Amazon’s S3 / EC2 services and was not very impressed.  They do so much throttling with their storage service that it is almost useless to me.

Anyway, as far as the outage is concerned, AskMyc.com should be up and running as soon as my domain’s DNS resolves to the alternate Azure instance.  What a drag!

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Search or Browse Meta Description and Keywords

Posted on February 23, 2012 and filed under Updates.

Websites.Askmyc.com gives you the ability to browse or search for websites by meta tag — keywords or description.  For anyone who does not know: Meta tags are arbitrary bits of information that a website designer can put in the <head> section of a website to give search engines an idea as to what the site is about.  Oftentimes, search engines will use your meta description as the subtitle for any indexed listings of your site it happens to display.

When you search for a site using a search engine, there are a wide range of factors that go into returning your results, including a website’s textual content, the site’s domain name and the reputation that site seems to have obtained over time.

In the case of AskMyc’s meta search feature, you can search through sites by referring only to meta tag information.  This might be more useful to web masters who want to find out how their site fares SEO-wise, but it might also be useful to anyone who want to search the web from a more limited perspective.

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Welcome to AskMyc.com

Posted on February 23, 2012 and filed under Updates.

“AskMyc” is short for “Ask My Computer.”  AskMyc offer an ever expanding range of free web-based tools, including a Website / SEO browser, a simple Website Down or Not page for verifying whether a particular site is down or not, an IP Address Browser, a Local IP Retrieval Tool for getting your personal computer’s IP address and a variety of other experimental projects that can viewed on the man AskMyc home page.

Look for more updates coming soon!

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