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.
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