Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

Most of us don’t mind giving up a small part of our privacy for our personal protection (airport scanners), or a good deal (loyalty shopping programs). We even voluntarily sign up for social networking sites that track every move we make and then sell aggregate information to marketers. But what about all the times we’re on the web and are not really sure about what search and browsing activities our ISP, or other company or agency is tracking?

(Let’s be realistic: the only way to not be tracked in any way online is to not go on online at all. Actually, you’d better leave your computer turned off, because many applications and programs on your computer automatically check for software updates and also track and record meta data. )

Tor is free software and an open network that claims to help you defend against a form of network surveillance that “threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships. It prevents your traffic from being analyzed by distributing your transactions over several places on the internet, so no single point can link you to your destination.” Maybe not every ISP uses traffic monitoring services – do you know if yours does? Even if you think it doesn’t, it’s a good idea to never search for your social security number and name, or passwords with any personal info. And if you’re a Tor user, please let us know how the service is working for you and what you had to give up to use it. In other words, what are the pros and cons of using Tor?

More free security resources…

Can your site handle a large increase in traffic? Pylot is a free open source tool for testing performance and scalability of web services. It runs HTTP load tests, which are useful for capacity planning, benchmarking, analysis, and system tuning.

Spam is like plague and anything that messes with spambots we’re interested in! Simply link to Spambot Stopper and any spambot that follows the link will be flooded with endless, fake, randomly generated e-mail addresses. Nice!

Get e-mail notification when your website is down and weekly statistics reports at FreeWebsiteMonitoring. Service promises to check your website every 60 minutes.

What if your site is down and you don’t know about it? Don’t wait till your visitors or customers tell you and sign up with the free website monitoring service Montastic. Montastic checks your site’s server at least 6 to 20 times a day. You can sign up to receive notices by e-mail or RSS.

Install this anti-phishing toolbar in your browser and get a ‘risk rating’ for every site you visit and a warning for every site with a ‘high risk’ rating. The Netcraft toolbar also shows you in which country a site is being hosted and how long the URL has been active.

Set your Wikialarm to send you an e-mail as soon as someone edits info on a wiki page about you, your business, or your website.

Not sure what to use this for, but now that you know how to easily edit any web page, you won’t fall for marketers’ realistic looking fake screen shots anymore, right? This won’t actually edit the web page for everyone, just for yourself on your browser of course.