The inspiration for SiteJuggler

If you know that, you encounter a problem and come up with a solution. But then you realize that if I add this, I will also solve another problem, and before you know it you have actually forgotten your original problem completely.

Well, that's how SiteJuggler was conceived.

The original probem

A few years ago I created an API that allowed employees to easily upload files and thus have a link to the file.

The tool used an FTP connection, which was far from desirable for user-friendliness. And that's why a simple upload solution was created.

This worked well in the beginning, but people often uploaded huge images and then used them on the website, which reduced the loading time.

So the next solution was to start a dedicated image upload API. The images were uploaded here and received a link back, but the images were then optimized for the web.

The old way was removed but the images were not. This was because it was not clear where the images were used within the website.
Now you can log when an image is requested where it came from, but then the image must be retrieved.

This gave rise to the idea of creating a crawler that visited a website so that you could easily find which URLs were linked to it. Then the images could easily be found and transferred.

But if this is possible, then also...

The idea of creating a crawler to find links immediately gave rise to further ideas. Because while you are crawling you can also;

Check the responses

It is important for the user experience that if someone follows a link, they do so. So if you do go through everything, check that the page can be reached and is not a dead link/404 page.

Check the response times

People want a fast page. But due to the passage of time and all kinds of dynamic content, we do not know how our website is doing. So it is useful to periodically check whether there are any slow pages.

SEO checks

Well, if you do see all the content, you can immediately check whether the basic SEO is correct. For example, check that there is always one and not more H1 headers present.

Security checks

Development does not stand still, so it is useful to have an automatic checker that checks that your website follows the latest best practices.

And more

And potentially someone has a wish that has not yet been conceived. This makes it necessary to be able to easily export the data so that you can work with it yourself

And so SiteJugger

But there is still a "fill in the blank tool", potentially you are right and there is a tool that does one of those things better.
What matters to me is that this is a user-friendly tool for people who are just starting out.

The first Alpha version

I now also have a version that I use for testing. In my next blog post I hope to be able to say that the first alpha version is available.

Thanks for reading and till next time.

Martijn