"Pornolize" for network testing - who knew?

Kasia recently mentioned the delightful www.pornolize.com service, which takes a URL as input, fetches the page, and produces an (ahem) slightly modified version. It's just hilarious to apply to your own page, and it's been a humor standby for some time.

But it's also a network testing tool: Wow!

Onsite at a customer installing a firewall, I had to test whether the internal web site was reachable from the outside through the firewall. My PalmPilot wasn't working, and nobody whose number I remembered was available. I didn't care to cool my heels, and then it hit me: pornolize!

Pornolize has to fetch the requested page just like somebody with a browser would, so if it's able to display an inappropriate-for-children version of the web page found on the internal server, then the firewall must have been set up correctly. Necessity is the clearly mother of invention.

Friends have pointed me to other services, such as the Altavista translator or an HTML validator, but these aren't my fun friends :-)

Who knew?

Posted by Steve at August 29, 2002 08:53 AM | TrackBack