Seeing Your Site from Off-Campus
We have sections and information on our website that changes depending on whether you are on-campus or off-campus. I develop on-campus, but sometimes need to see the site from that off-campus perspective. What’s a developer to do?
I could walk home and check the site from there, but that’s a pain. I could also setup my home machine with VNC or OS X’s screen sharing, but that too is a pain and a potential security hole. Instead, I go the easy route and use a couple of browser-based proxies that show me the view of my website from off-campus.
The first tool I use is Proxify. The site is fast and easy to use – and if you want additional features or more usage credits, you can pay a couple of dollars a month for premium access. If you don’t pay, you may occasionally be locked out during times of high usage.
Privax runs a series of proxies that are also free. Their sites run under a bunch of different names. For job security reasons, I’d recommend shying away from the following: hidemyass.com, proxypimp.com or BoratProxy.com. I’d stick to something a little tamer. I use vulb.com as my Privax site of choice, but it’s up to you.
If you’d like to explore more options, here’s a list of web-based proxies.
Be aware when using these proxies: they will affect your browsing in different ways. Some strip out javascript, cookies and other functionality. Others will insert ads around your site. Some will not let you use a web form to post anything (I can imagine this has been abused on blogs by people wanting to post really anonymous comments.) But, if all your testing is whether certain content is showing, this is a good way to go.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Nice post. Usually I’ll just Google for a proxy whenever I need one, but I’ll reform my ways and use your recommended ones.
So Mike would you recommend Proxify or a sites on the Privax network as the best?
Proxies have so many other uses, i.e. get around security restrictions, that they can be dangerous in the wrong hands. I think the biggest mainstream use for them now is for people at work logging into MySpace or Facebook when their corporate settings ban these sites. Opps… I probably shouldn’t mention that for the people who read this and are looking for ways around the system.
They’re both good, but Privax doesn’t shut you out if a lot of people are using the service, which is nice.
I agree with you about the nefarious uses. I try to stay on the light side of the force with them, and use them only to check my sites out.