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Showing posts from January, 2011

Using Gmail aliases to create multiple test email accounts for QA

Came across this today when someone wanted to know how to create multiple email test accounts without involving their IT department (don’t ask!) or managing multiple free email accounts. Gmail allows you to create aliases for your email address automatically. For example, if your Gmail account is joe.bloggs@gmail.com then joe.bloggs+test.case01@gmail.com will work for your account – anything after the “+” sign can be used to create an alias.  These emails will be delivered to your normal Gmail inbox. So when you are testing you can use +test.case01, +test.case02, +test.case03 and so on as your test email addresses (assuming that your application doesn’t get upset at the use of the “+” in an email address. It shouldn’t, its a valid character in the RFC http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3696#page-5 ) So lets say you want to filter these test emails and label so they don’t get lost in your Inbox. Easy, just use a Gmail filter and search for a whatever common “stem” you used in f

London Web Performance Meetup

Just a reminder that the first London Web Performance Meetup will be taking place on Wed 19th January! http://www.meetup.com/London-Web-Performance-Group/calendar/15729259/?from=list&offset=0   The guys from Seatwave have kindly agreed to present a case study on their performance improvement project for www.seatwave.com. Perry & Ged have some great "real world" information on what worked for them from a technical perspective and how they managed the project overall. Please RSVP on meetup.com if you are going to attend! See you there from 6pm.

Top 13 Website Crashes of 2010?

I was doing a bit of research for an article and I started compiling a list of high-profile website crashes in 2010. Pingdom have published a list here - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/major_internet_incidents_and_outages_of_2010.php as have Alertsite here - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/29/the-biggest-web-outages-o_n_801943.html But I decided to compile my own list from a more UK-centric perspective and came up with my “baker’s dozen” below. # Site Date News Link 1 National Rail Jan-10 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/05/rail_chaos/ 2 Outnet Apr-10 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/blog/2010/apr/16/outnet-sale-website-crash 3 Apple (iPhone 4 Launch) Jun-10 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1286756/Apple-iPhone-4-pre-order-Website-crashes-new-iPhone-goes-sale.html 4 ITV.com (World C