I used to add my codes manually to the templates. Whenever I changed the template I had to remember to also update the verification code. This became a tedious task and I thought that there should be an easier way to do this. So I looked for a WordPress plugin thinking that someone should have already written one. When I didn’t find one I decided to write my own. This is actually the first plugin I have published. I am planning on creating some updates in the future and am more than happy to hear about suggestions.

Stephan has been a user of Nibbler since we launched the latest version back in October and is currently the 41st highest user.

What I like most about Nibbler is that it simply gives you hints and tips on how to improve your website across a number of areas. When I make changes I can easily track my progress. And when all suggestions and errors are fixed I come out at the top (see one of my websites http://www.ldstoolbar.com)

You can download the wordpress plugin here or search the plugins directory inside your WordPress install for the word “nibbler”. The installed plugin will look like this:

Simply add your verification code and press save. Your verification code is the long string of numbers inside the meta tag we give you when you select to claim a website.

A few weeks ago we announced a competition for Nibbler users to upload a cool background to their profile, and here we’re showcasing our favourites!

Jonghdesign

Stephan Gerlach

Scott Mokler

Theodor Daniel

Man Ma

And here’s a special mention to Clint Creation who I presume has drawn a self portrait for his background image!

Clint Creation

We got an interesting question on our feedback community last week about how Nibbler ranks websites by popularity. I thought the answer might be interesting to anyone else who’s been wondering how we calculate the popularity score.

So I just checked www.google.com and for Popularity it scored 8.1. Looking at the details it says it’s the most popular website. So shouldn’t it get a 10 for this then??
Stephan Gerlach

The popularity score in Nibbler is made up of a few different factors.

A large percentage of the score is determined by the Alexa rank. In this case we can see that www.google.com ranks as the #1 most popular website in the world.

This is great for Google of course, but most websites aren’t this popular. Even if a website is the 1 millionth popular in the world, it might actually be the world’s #1 best pet shop website, although obviously it’s not as popular as Facebook although it doesn’t need to be. So getting a higher rank isn’t everything. Another proportion of the score is decided by the growth over the last 3 months. This is to reward websites that might currently be the 1 millionth in the world, but have actually made a huge improvement recently.

Nibbler says “This website recently saw a slight increase in popularity” this means popularity has increased, but only slightly. For example, this might only be an increase of 10%.

The Alexa rank only gives us a popularity rank for the TLD (google.com). Unfortunately it’s not possible to distinguish popularity for each subdomain (for example mail.google.com or docs.google.com). Nibbler tells us that the main site www.google.com accounts for 69.9% of this traffic, so it could be that it’s lost some points because of its subdomains.

I hope you agree that this actually makes sense and can understand why we do it this way. We’re not scoring websites purely based on their ranked position, it’s more involved than that. We happen to think that this makes it fairer for other websites, but let us know what you think.

And thanks for the question Stephan!

We think it’s time for a new Nibbler competition! We noticed today that some users are using the backgrounds on their profiles to make them look even more awesome, and that gave us an idea! If you upload a cool new background to your Nibbler profile, we’ll showcase it in a blog article in a few weeks time.

You might know that you can choose between some colourful default different background images for your profile, but did you know you can upload your own branded image? Here’s some Nibbler profiles that already have cool backgrounds:

Oisin Conolly's Nibbler profile

Karen Thompson's Nibbler profile

Eduard Weber's Nibbler profile

How to change your background

To change your background, go to your profile and click Edit details.

You’ll see a choice of other backgrounds here , and an option to upload your own.

If your image is small you’ll likely want it to be tiled, this works best if it’s a repeatable image of you’ll have an odd line where the image ends (even if you can’t see this, someone with a higher screen resolution might).

If you upload a cool image we’ll show a screenshot in a blog article in two weeks time with a link to your profile. This’ll be a great way to show off your Nibbler profile so make sure you’ve claimed your best websites!

After you’ve uploaded your photo, why not Tweet it with the hashtag #nibblerbg too?

Our website testing tool Nibbler will award you with badges when you claim certain websites. We’ve given you a bit of a head start on how to collect some of these badges here, but we’ve deliberately left some a mystery!

Some of these badges are much harder to collect than others. In this article we’ll show you some badges that are really difficult to collect, and even some that nobody has claimed yet – could you be the first?

If you’re interested in winning $100 of Amazon vouchers this December, pay extra attention! There are three lots of vouchers up for grabs in our Christmas competition but you’ll need to claim plenty of badges to win.

Hard to get

A-List

A-list is one of the new popularity badges we’ve added recently. To claim this badge you need to have one of the 100 most popular websites in the world (as ranked by Alexa). This list includes superstars like Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia and other really well known websites. So far this badge hasn’t been claimed; maybe you’ll be the first to receive it?

Link bait

It’s a fact that some websites are linked to more than others. Many sites are useful sources of information so attract lots of links -think about how many websites link to Wikipedia! The Link bait badge is awarded to websites with over 10,000 other sites linking to it. Any site wanting to climb up the Google search rankings should be looking to get as many incoming links as possible, but it’s not that easy, so this badge is a small reward for all your hard work.

Memetastic

Gay sharks

In series 1 of Glee, Brittany the cheerleader created an internet meme when she asked “Did you know that dolphins are just gay sharks?” We created a badge awarded to any site mentioning this popular phrase, but it’s never been claimed. Maybe there’s not many webdevelopers who are fans of Glee. Who knew?

Charlie Sheen

Clearly nobody is ‘Winning’ as much as Charlie Sheen, as this badge hasn’t yet been claimed. Get yourself addicted to the drug called Charlie Sheen bro!

TV/Film badges

This parrot is dead…

Quoting Monty Python sketches might annoy your colleagues, but it’ll actually earn you a badge in Nibbler! If Nibbler finds some lines from the famous dead parrot sketch on your website you’ll get a special badge. There’s also a separate badge to collect for quoting a certain song about lumberjacks too. Currently nobody holds this badge, so what are you waiting for?

Futurama

With one of the characters called Nibbler, the cartoon Futurama holds a special place in our hearts. If we find character names on your website we’ll award you a Futurama badge, and if you claim it today you’ll probably be the first.

Badges for geeks

Big Bang Theory is a US sitcom about geeks. Nibbler rewards mentions of characters from the series with a special badge. There are also badges available for sites referencing popular words and character names from Star Trek, Star Wars and several other geeky films and TV shows.

Tongue tied chemist

Chemistry has lots of really long and complicated words. We thought we’d reward chemistry websites with a special badge,although the words we look for are probably quite niche like Tetramethyldiaminobenzhydrylphosphinous and Formaldehydetetramethylamidofluorimum (yes these are real chemistry words!). Currently nobody has claimed this badge, and to be honest we’d be surprised if someone did. Go on, impress us!

Technology

Browser wars

We’re quite glad that this badge hasn’t been collected many times. Any website that includes the text “best viewed in Netscape” or similar browsers will be awarded (if that’s the right term) this badge. So far only one user has claimed this badge – it’s not something to be proud of.

HTML5 black belt

We want to reward web developers who work long and hard making great websites with modern technology. If you claim over 30 websites built using HTML5 you’ll be awarded the HTML black belt badge. So far only one person has claimed this badge, could you be the 2nd?

Of course, some of these badges were created just for fun , so they only add a few meagre points to your overall score; but some of the more difficult badges will reward you handsomely for your efforts. And who knows, this might just rocket you up the leaderboard if you’re trying to win our December competition.

We’re running a competition this month to reward the users who make it to the top of the user leaderboards. Today’s the day we announce the winner of the 1st award.

The winner is…

Well done! John wins $100 dollars worth of Amazon gift vouchers.

It could be your turn next!

The competition isn’t over, we’re doing it all again next week! (and the week after too). We’ll check the leaderboards on Wednesday the 14th of December and give another award to the top user.

If you want to know more about the competition click here to see the rules.

As well as being a useful tool for testing your website, we also wanted Nibbler to be a fun site for web developers and designers. There’s already been some tussling for the #1 top user spot on the leaderboards which has changed several times, in this week alone.

The competition and the prize

As if getting to the #1 spot wasn’t enough of a reward in itself, we’ve decided that with Christmas coming up we’d like to give some special presents to those that reach the prestigious top spot.

So we’re giving away three lots of Amazon gift vouchers during December – worth $100 each. That’s not to be sniffed at, so please share this article and let’s get as many people as possible involved!

How to win

We’re running the competition three times in December, and will award prizes for the top user on these dates:

• Wednesday 7th December
• Wednesday 14th December
• Wednesday 21st December

Just to be fair, if the same user is #1 for all three weeks, we’ll award the other two sets of vouchers to the #2 and #3 users.

Rules

Read these carefully, we don’t want any cheating going on!

• The winner will be the member who is in #1 position on the top user leaderboard at exactly 4pm GMT on Wednesday 7th, 14th and 21st of December.
• A member can win only once. If the same member is at #1 position the following week, we will award the prize to the first runner up. If we find that a member has created a duplicate account, the winner will be the next runner up and the duplicate account will be deleted without warning.
• In the unlikely event of a tie (where more than one user has the exact same score), the award will be divided between the winners.
• Nibbler has many users from all over the world so we’ll try to get vouchers for your local Amazon store, (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de etc) to the value of $100 USD which will be converted into your local currency.

If you’ve won, we’ll contact you after the date and send you your voucher by email.

Want to know the winner immediately?

Join the Nibbler newsletter to receive an email when the winners have been announced.

Good luck and Happy Christmas!

The effectiveness and popularity of a website isn’t just limited to the technology used to build it, there’s lots more us web developers have to do these days than just build a website. With all the SEO, linkbuilding and social media we have to do, we’re always on our toes! So we’ve created a few new badges in Nibbler that reward web developers for all their hard work.

The After Eight badge

The new ‘After Eight’ badge (named after… can you guess? Our favourite mint chocolate!) actually started as an idea suggested to us by a Nibbler user. You’ll be awarded this badge if all your websites score over 8.0 (you need at least 3).

Social Media badges added

Social media continues to be a great way to advertise your site, and often isn’t easy. It can take a lot of effort to get people talking about your site on Twitter, so we want to reward websites that have got people tweeting about them. Any tweets about the site makes the site elligable for the ‘Tweeted’ badge, and 20 Tweets gets you the ‘Well Tweeted’ badge. If the site’s gone viral and has over 1000 tweets, it’ll get ‘Massively Tweeted’.

Popularity badges added

We’ve added a few badges based on the world popularity of your website. If you test a website in the top 100 (c’mon Zuckerburg, you know you want to claim Facebook in Nibbler!) you’re qualify for the A-list badge, or a site in the top 10,000 or 100,000 will get the B-list and C-list badges. We get this information from Alexa, and if it doesn’t currently have a rank for your website it’ll be awarded the Z-list badge.

To improve your popularity it helps a lot if you get other sites linking to yours. This will increase your SEO ranking and also drive much needed traffic to the site. We want to reward websites with a lot of incoming links with the ‘Linked’, ‘Well linked’ badges if it has over 100 or 1000 incoming links, and if the site is popular enough to get over 10,000 incoming links it’ll get the ‘Link bait’ badge.

If you want to increase your user score, claim a website with these new badges and it’ll be added to your score. Retest your websites to see if they get these new badges.

Claiming badges for good practice

When we originally invented the badges we came up with some great ideas that people would want to claim and proudly show on their profile. Some of these were sensible things, like the ‘W3C compliance‘ and ‘HTML5‘ badge, adding these to a profile allows a user to proudly boast that they’re consider accessibility for disabled users, really care about the quality of their code, and are forward thinking enough to use new technologies.

Extra badges

We also created some fun badges, which are a little bit obscure and are awarded to users for the content of their site. For example there’s the ‘Mad Men‘ badge which is awarded to sites mentioning characters from the popular TV drama, and the ‘Cat lover‘ which we created as an inside joke, awarded to sites with the phrase “Here is a picture of my cat”!

We created these badges to add an extra dimension to Nibbler, more of a fun game really. There’s still loads of badges that I bet you haven’t even seen, or know you could get!

The problem with content badges

Unfortunately with these fun badges, they’ve been misused. We found that a few users were creating content on their websites that was hidden from view and only visible to Nibbler and Search Engines. This allowed them to claim these extra fun badges and increase their score.

We had a long debate about this in the Silktide office, while we wanted it to be a fun game to find and collect these extra badges, we decided that it wasn’t really fair that people could claim these and use it to climb to the top of the Leaderboards, passing users who were creating genuinely good quality websites.

Rewarding good practice

We decided that we should go back to Nibbler’s original goal for the Leaderboards, which is to reward users who are creating genuinely good websites, using good technology, and working with web standards.

So we’ve changed the scoring system, giving many more points to the badges we think reward good practice, and reducing or removing points from the badges that don’t. Sorry, but if you do use the phrase “Here is a picture of my cat” on your website – you don’t deserve to be rewarded for it!

Introducing the Multi-badge!

Like we said above, we want to reward users who are creating good quality websites. Before we made these changes, you would only be awarded points the first time you get a badge. Claiming additional websites with a ‘W3C Compliant badge‘, for example, wouldn’t give you any more points.

So we’ve introduced the W3C multi-badges. You’re awarded:

• ‘W3C Apprentice’ for claiming 3 compliant sites
• ‘W3C Maestro’ for 8 compliant sites
• ‘W3C Master’ for 15 compliant sites
• ‘W3C Black Belt’ if you claim… actually we’ll let you work that out for yourself!

There’s also multi-badges available for the amount of sites you claim, and for the amount of HTML5 sites you claim. We’ll be adding more soon.

Duplicate profiles

Another thing we’ve noticed lately is that some people are creating duplicate profiles to show on the Leaderboards, to promote their company or product. While we don’t mind people using their Nibbler profile to showcase their best work and to show off (it is a great way to show your skills as a webdeveloper!), we also don’t want the entire leaderboard to be filled with adverts for products, especially if it’s a duplicate account owned by another member.

If you think about this it’s just not fair for the other users who might not be able to reach the top if the leaderboards are flooded with duplicate accounts held by only one or two users. So we’ve changed our terms & conditions to state that one user can’t have more than one account, and will start cracking down on this very soon!

Nibbler is our popular free tool for testing websites. And as of today, it’s now a tool for showcasing and sharing the work of web developers, designers and content creators too.

After months of work and help from our lovely beta group, Nibbler’s now even better, and still free. Try out the new Nibbler now, or read on to find out why it’s so awesome.

So what’s changed?

Lots of things have changed in the new Nibbler, in fact you’ll barely recognise it. As well as the radical new design and logo, we’ve added loads of new features too.

You’re still able to test websites (that’s the whole point!), but we’ve made all thetests better, more efficient and more accurate. We’ve also changed the look of the website reports and broken it down over multiple pages so you get more detail.

Your personal website profile

The biggest change in Nibbler is that you can now showcase your own websites on your profile.

You’ll now be able to claim websites as your own, which will add them to your personal profile. You’ll be able to use this to show off your website scores to others, and build up a portfolio of your work that’s been objectively rated.

You can also customise your profile by uploading your own individual background.

Earning badges

When you claim websites as your own, you’ll notice that you’ll receive badges relating to some part of that website. There’ll be badges about the technology you’ve used and the content on your site. The more badges you have, the higher your score. You can see a list of top users by score here.

Some badges are serious and some just for fun – they are intended to just give a quick indication of a site. For example you’ll get the ‘HTML5‘ badge if you claim a website using HTML5, the ‘W3C Rebel‘ badge if your site isn’t compliant , or the ‘Migrane‘ badge if you use the old MAQUEE tag in your HTML! There’s also loads of hidden ones which you’ll have to find out for yourself. Here’s a head start: you’ll get the ‘Cat Lover‘ badge if you use the phrase “Here is a picture of my cat” somewhere on your site.

Create your website profile and start claiming websites

To make the most of the new features in Nibbler, create yourself an account, and start claiming sites to add them to your profile. All your sites will appear on your profile and give you more points. So get testing, claiming and boasting!