It’s becoming increasingly important to be able to test your website – be it a standard version, responsive or a mobile specific version – on multiple devices. All of the major smartphone makers use Webkit (the basis of Chrome & Safari), except, of course, Microsoft.

Quite often websites will display the same in Google Chrome as they do on Android. However, sometimes they do not. Also, sometimes interactivity needs to be tested to see just how well it works on a touchscreen. Using the Android SDK helps you do that without having to have a huge range of devices with multiple versions of the Android OS at your disposal.

Step 1: Downloading and Installing the Android SDK

Download the SDK from the Android developer site
Read the Installation instructions – the page will change depending on which OS you use it for. I’m on a Mac, so I see the Mac instructions.

Personally I put the unzipped folder into my /Applications/Utilities directory.

Step 2: Preparing the Emulator

You’re going to notice there aren’t any applications you can just double click on and have them work. For non-Windows users, you’re going to be working inside the tools directory as well.

Windows: double-click on the SDK Manager.exe in the main Android SDK directory.
Mac or Linux: You will need to use the Terminal to start the emulator. Then you need to type ./android sdk from within the tools directory.

Step 3: Creating an “Android Virtual Device” (AVD)

- In the window, on the top right there’s a button for New… Click that
- Give it a name, and choose a Target – this is the version of android you want to use. I chose 2.3.3 as it’s very common right now. 4.0.3 is also becoming popular, so if you’re reading this a few months after publishing, I’d go with 4.0.3. (I currently use both.) You can also check for  the current Android version marketshare.
- Set the resolution. I chose WVGA800
- IMPORTANT: Under Hardware, click New… and add Keyboard support. Then set the Value to Yes. Otherwise typing will be a pain This will allow you use your computer keyboard with the Android SDK emulator.

Step 4: Start the Android Emulator

With the Android Virtual Device Manager still open, select the device and click Start… leave the settings on the next window as their default settings, then click Launch.

Step 5: Login and Launch the Default Android Browser

You will need to click and drag the lock icon to the right to login. After you do that, click the globe icon to launch the web browser.

Chances are you’ll quickly want to rotate the screen into landscape view, and there’s not a single UI element to help you do this (unlike the iOS SDK.) There’s several keyboard commands which may help you, including rotating the screen. They’re here http://developer.android.com/tools/help/emulator.html#controlling

Why not use Internet Explorer 9’s Developer Tools for testing IE8 & IE7? Here’s why.

Twice last week this issue has come up so I’m providing some examples and reasoning as to why you should not even bother using Internet Explorer 9 for testing websites for how they would look in Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 7.

Background
IE has traditionally not been developer friendly out of the box. In IE9, that changed and Microsoft provided Compatibility Modes within Developer Tools (F12).

Months back, working with a couple devs, I was told this is how they test with IE8. I thought “wow, great that Microsoft is trying to help developers.” I never looked into this feature before, as I had always just used VMs for testing, long before IE9. So when IE9 came out, I continued that patter. (Microsoft provides free virtual machine images for testing.) However, my distrust for them overpowered me and I decided to run some tests.

The first test I ran was Acid3 http://acid3.acidtests.org/ Viewing the screenshots below, you will see the immediate differences I saw: A different score and slightly different rendering (eg “FAIL” in the corner.)

Acid3 test in IE8 (native)

Acid3 test in IE9 set to IE8 mode

Keep in mind one huge difference is the new JavaSript engine in IE9. Changing to IE8 or IE7 does not change the JS engine. This should be a huge red flag to those who were working on this feature, but based on results, they thought it was worth shipping anyway even though they acknowledge it’s a big issue http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/03/24/ie9-s-document-modes-and-javascript.aspx

“We have made every effort to ensure that IE9’s compatibility document modes support the same functionality that we shipped for these modes in IE8. However, because the Chakra engine is not the same as we shipped in IE8, it is bound to have some differences.”

This is an important issue, and I disagree that they “made every effort”  as they could have built it to switch engines, but I digress…

Now I have run into a few more people thinking this works, as well as a few more scenarios where it doesn’t – unrelated to JavaScript. There’s also CSS issues which I haven’t seen Microsoft acknowledge.

Here’s a few examples to show you how IE8 stacks up to IE9 in IE8 mode.

Finally, I did some of these same tests in IE7 and encountered similar results.

Support forums are nothing new. They exist for all sorts of projects, including just about every WordPress plugin. 99.9% of the time they are “users helping users” with the occasional response from a developer.

That’s how WooThemes handled their forum, until recently. Although their official responses were fairly common, users could still help users. Now WooThemes has overhauled their backend (dashboard), along with their support forum.

Users can no longer help users.

Why? Because WooThemes saw people were often posting to resolved threads trying to get answers. This is really common on forums. In fact, many forums will ban you if you start a new thread instead of reviving a recent one on the same topic. WooThemes thinks this doesn’t work well for them. (They also mentioned sometimes posts were creating confusion.)

WooThemes has gone and done two thing in opposition to the status quo. And you know what? It’s for the better.

Better WordPress Theme Support

The reason WooThemes has done this is because they want each and every forum question to get an official response. I don’t know of a single other product support forum that does this. Not even big companies like Intel offer this sort of support.

There are quite a few companies that promise quick response times from customer support. Really those are quite pointless. Often they’re canned responses that are sent simply to get back to you quickly. My least favorite are the one that ask you information you just provided them with like “What browser are you using?” And you already told them “Chrome 15.0.874.15, extensions off, cache flushed.”

WooThemes does things differently. Their responses are always useful. Sometimes they remind users they need more info, but sometimes that’s needed. They offer simply awesome support and not only that, but now they’ve streamlined it as well.

In the end my only complaint is that I can no longer give them a hand by answering questions or help confirm issues.

A year or so ago I did some research and testing of the variety of website uptime monitoring services out there. Sure any half-decent host does this as well, but sometimes a server only goes down externally and sometimes it doesn’t trigger their monitors. I also did this because I wanted to get a clear picture of just how much downtime a site might have.

Sites do go down, even if just for schedule maintenance. I wanted to see just how reliable my hosts were. Some of my hosting is supposed to be much more reliable than other hosts, and I wanted to see if I was getting what I was paying for.

When searching the first thing I realized were most all of the free or free trial offers were limited to the point of being useless. The next thing I noticed was that the paid options seemed rather expensive.

But then I came across Uptime Robot. They provided monitoring up to 50 sites – for free. They offer a number of configuration options, as well as uptime checking every five minutes which is much better than the 10-30 minutes other services offer. (I mean, really. If a service is only going to check every 30 minutes, that’s pretty much worthless. I’m going to have received a call by then.)

I’ve exchanged some emails with Uptime Robot. They helped me discover a problem with one host’s email, and they also implemented a feature I requested. They’ve been monitoring away on about a dozen sites of mine for about a year now, and they’ve done a very good job at it.