2 Great Tools to Check Global Accessibility to Your Website

Would you like to know how long it takes for your customers/readers across the world to reach your website? Any techie would know that you can use the ping tool from your machine. But how do you reach the four corners of the world to do the ping test?

Try just-ping.com.

It is a web tool that pings your website from all around the world, in fact, from 38 locations around the world at the time of this writing.

Next is the just-traceroute.com , again from the same people.

This has remote terminals across the world and allows you to see the route from the machine to your website. This is particularly useful to debug latency problems, and also DNS problems.

Both tools will give you a glimpse into the performance of your website as seen by your customers. Of course, network latency is only part of the total performance, but it is an important one and cannot be ignored.

Superb free book for Software Architects

If you are a software architect or want to be a software architect, I highly recommend this superb free book from Microsoft. It is really a treasure trove of information for architecting software systems. It is not an academic book, rather, it incorporates wisdom from the field.

Application Architecture Guide 2.0

Although it includes information on how to build applications on the .NET platform, it's utility is not restricted to just .NET. The principles and guidelines can be applied to non-microsoft platforms too.