Adobe Shadow makes it easy to test your site on multiple devices at the same time. Photo: Adobe

Today’s web shows up on a tremendous variety of screens — desktops, televisions, tablets, phones and lately “phablets” (whatever those are). Testing your site on even a fraction of the devices available can seem like a full time job. Tools like Adobe Shadow simplify the process somewhat, refreshing your local site across devices with the click of a button. But Shadow has limitations, for instance, it only works with WebKit browsers.

If you’ve got a wide array of devices to test with you’ll probably want a local network solution — that is, serve your site over your local network and connect all your test devices to that virtual host domain.

Unfortunately setting up a local network and connecting to it can be a pain, which is where the curiously-named Xip.io comes in. Xip.io is a wildcard DNS service that makes it drop-dead simple to set up a network and connect any device to your local test site.

The service is really just a custom DNS server you can easily tap into. So, for example, if your LAN IP address is 10.0.0.1, using Xip.io, mysite.10.0.0.1.xip.io resolves to 10.0.0.1. With the DNS taken care of you can access virtualhosts on your local development server from any devices on your local network, zero configuration required.

Xip.io is a free service from 37signals, whose Sam Stephenson says, “we were tired of jumping through hoops to test our apps on other devices and decided to solve the problem once and for all.” Xip.io might not work for everyone, but if you’ve ever struggled and failed to set up and test sites on a local network, Xip.io might be able to help.

Testing websites with Screenfly

Unless you’ve got a giant horde of cash stashed under your desk, you probably don’t have every tablet and phone out there. Even if you did have every mobile device and screen size on the market, would you really want to test a website in every single one?

That would be incredibly inefficient when there’s nice web-based tools like Screenfly that can handle it all for you. Head over to Screenfly, plug in the URL you’d like to test and then start flipping through the various tablet and mobile device screen sizes to see how your @media queries are handling smaller screens.

Screenfly doesn’t account for rendering differences between devices (which should be minimal given that most mobile web browsers are based on the same WebKit rendering engine), but it does do a good job of showing you what your shiny new design looks like on the latest tablets.

There are of course other web-based tools out there that can help in similar ways, but we like Screenfly for its clean, simple interface and nicely done transitions. If you’ve got a favorite, drop a link in the comments and we’ll check it out. If you like Screenfly, you might want to keep an eye on Quirktools, the makers of Screenfly. The developers claim to have a wireframe app (no flash) and some other tools in the works.

See Also:

• Tips, Tricks and Best Practices for Responsive Design
• How to Have Your @Media Queries and Eat IE Too
• Why Percentage-Based Designs Don’t Work in Every Browser

Want to know if your website can stand up to a sudden, massive deluge of traffic? Sure, you could use some of the available tools like Flood, JMeter or The Ginder. But none of those options have bees with machine guns.

The news applications team at the Chicago Tribune, has released a new tool it calls Bees with Machine Guns that uses Amazon EC2 servers to launch what amounts to a distributed DoS attack against your site.

Now only is it an incredibly handy way to load test a website under arguably more realistic conditions than you’d get with other load testing tools, Bees with Machine Guns has awesome print statements that will turn your terminal session into a war zone.

For example:

$ fab -f bees.py attack:http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/,1000,100
Read 2 bees from the roster.
Connecting to the hive.
Assembling bees.
Each of 2 bees will fire 500 rounds, 50 at a time.
Stinging URL so it will be cached for the attack.
[localhost] run: curl http://YOUR-DOMAIN.com/ >> /dev/null
Organizing the swarm.
Bee 0 is joining the swarm.
Bee 1 is joining the swarm.
Bee 0 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 1 is firing his machine gun. Bang bang!
Bee 0 is out of ammo.
Bee 1 lost sight of the target (connection timed out).
Offensive complete.
     Target failed to fully respond to 1 bees.
     Complete requests:     500
     Requests per second:   81.670000 [#/sec] (mean)
     Time per request:      612.188000 [ms] (mean)
     50% response time:     358.000000 [ms] (mean)
     90% response time:     1541.000000 [ms] (mean)
Mission Assessment: Target successfully fended off the swarm.
The swarm is awaiting new orders.
Done.

Keep in mind that this is essentially a DoS attack. Launch it against a site that isn’t yours and very bad things will happen to you. But for testing your own site’s performance, Bees with Machine Guns is awesome — all you need is an EC2 account and the script.

Major bonus points if your site can fend off the bees with miniature pies:

See Also:

• Development Tips to Improve Your Code Quality
• Write Your README Before Your Code
• Google’s New Cloud Storage Service Takes on Amazon S3