Today’s Byte is for folks who have web sites. For the rest I say Happy Mother’s Day and/or don’t forget to call your mom! NetMechanic is an old favorite site. It seemed to disappear for a while so I lost track of it – but recently we have been reunited. NetMechanic runs tests on your web site to see how it’s running and how it compares to other sites. Here are a few of the tools you can try for free on NetMechanic:

HTML Tool box
Enter your URL and it will test up to 5 of your pages for free. It tests the basics: spelling, HTML code, links, and load time.

GIFbot
Upload your web images and GIFbot will optimize them – giving you several options to choose. Each image includes download time so that you can decide how to balance quality of image with time to download.

Search Engine Submission
Enter your URL and information on content and they will submit your site to up to 12 search engines. Normally I would be skeptical of a bulk submission tool – but NetMechanic doesn’t make any promises and they report on their submission success. (You wouldn’t’ want to do this more than once every 2-3 months.)