Some of you may remember Silktide’s excellent (free) Sitescore utility which was withdrawn a year or two ago, presumably due to the enormous amount of bandwidth being consumed by it. The premise was simple, type in your site’s url, hit enter, wait a few minutes and BAM! there’s your website summed up in a number between 0 and 10. Usually this would be followed by a look of dismay as you see a couple of hundred infractions in the breakdown of Sitescore’s analysis of your website. Although no ratings-based tool can ever judge how good or bad your website will perform in the real world, Sitescore was a useful all-in-one code validator, content scanner and backlink checker that pointed out the areas where your site fell short. And now its back, well, kind of.

Nibbler is Sitescore’s little baby brother, offering you just a tiny glimpse of what you will get when you sign up for Silktide’s professional analysis package Siteray. It’s still in ‘alpha’ stage of the development and will only test 5 pages of your site but, despite this, I have found myself using Nibbler everyday since I discovered it’s existence. The only problem I have with Nibbler (and also previously with Sitescore) is the damned addictive nature of it’s rating system that has you chasing every single infraction in your site’s code to get a higher score. Forgot to explicitly define the size of all your images? Tut tut. You lose one point there. Using the same meta tags for more than one page? You lose another point there, bub. And so on.

Nibbler, thankfully, doesn’t have a league table (as did Sitescore) so there’s no, “If I can just break into the top 100, I’ll be happy”, thoughts going through your head when you use it. Having said that, seeing your site work it’s way up the league table was half the fun so I’m posting my best score here and everyone else is welcome to do the same. Just don’t get too addicted to it…