protodemo workshop

Site X-ray

Type any website. Nine checks run at once and a dashboard resolves in front of you — the same tile format I use to watch my own infrastructure, pointed outward at public data.

Or try:

Green — everything this check looks for is there Amber — some of it, or a common shortcut Red — little or none of it, and a real gap Grey — could not be checked from outside

Open any tile for what it means and how the colour was decided.

What this is

I keep an operations dashboard for my own systems — a grid of tiles, each one glanceable in a second, each one expanding into the detail behind it. Most of those tiles read private data and have to stay private. Some of them don't: they ask questions about a website that anyone can ask about any website. This is those tiles, rebuilt.

What it checks

The safety rules a site sends your browser, and how fast it answered. Whether search engines can find its pages, by reading the file it publishes for them and following the sitemap it declares rather than guessing where one might be. Which other companies' servers the homepage pulls from. And what the site's legal documents cost you: how many there are, how long, and when they were last revised.

It also asks whether someone could send email pretending to be the site. Four public records are involved, and they are worth knowing by name because you will meet them again: SPF lists which servers may send mail for the domain, DMARC tells receiving inboxes what to do when a message fails that test, MX says where the domain's own mail arrives, and DNSSEC signs the answers so they cannot be tampered with in transit. The first two are the ones that stop forgery; most sites publish them, and almost nobody publishes the fourth.

The legal tiles count, they do not judge

Every number there is a word count, a date, a heading count, or a published readability index. Nothing summarises a document and nothing grades one. That is a deliberate line: a summary is a claim about what a document says, and a wrong one is a false statement about somebody's business. Counting has no such failure mode.

It also only follows links the homepage itself offers, so a document that exists but isn't linked from the front page won't be found. None of this is legal advice, and it measures the documents as written — not what anyone actually does.

Fine print

Results are cached for fifteen minutes, so a second look at the same site won't re-fetch it. Only public addresses are checked. Nothing you type is stored. Some sites block automated requests and will simply come back grey.