The Daily Feed Issue #27: Creating a mobile test lab for your site

Welcome to Issue #27 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more. If you have questions about SEO, SEM or getting traffic, please post them to 503me.com (it's free).

Today I'm going to describe how to create a basic mobile test lab on your PC or Mac. Before I do that, there was an interesting question posted a few hours ago on 503me asking whether RSS is dead. I'm curious to know how many of you still use RSS, so post an answer and let us know.

Lets chat about setting up a mobile test lab for your site on your PC laptop or Macbook. First, lets cover the easy one: PC.

PC or PC Laptop

The great thing about PC's is that they come with Internet explorer. The Mac guys have to jump through a few hoops to get this set up (see below). 

Here are the browsers you need to install on your PC laptop to get your lab set up:

• Internet Explorer 8 (and use compatibility mode as described yesterday to simulate version 7)
• Google Chrome 6
• Firefox 3.6
• Opera 10.62
• Safari for Windows (optional)

The above setup will catch most rendering and page execution bugs. Google Chrome uses the same rendering engine (called WebKit) as Safari, so testing in Chrome will catch a lot of problems that would have also shown up in Safari, so I've marked Safari as optional.

Macbook or Mac workstation

You absolutely must test your site in Internet Explorer version 8. It's essential. So you can't use a Mac as a test lab unless you run a virtual machine. My mobile test lab runs on a Macbook Pro. I run something called VMWare which allows me to simultaneously run Windows inside Mac's OS X. Unfortunately VMWare is a commercial product and it costs about $80 bucks. You'll also have to get licensed copies of the Windows versions you want to run. 

VMWare is great. I can run multiple versions of Windows simultaneously and switch between them as I'm working. I usually run Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. On these I run Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 respectively. Then on OS X itself (the Mac operating system that is hosting all these virtual machines) I run Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I even have a Linux version running in a virtual machine in case I want to test that too. 

With this setup I can grab my Macbook, hit the road and if a customer calls with a problem on a certain operating system in a certain browser, I am 100% sure I can reproduce the problem on an operating system and browser that is exactly the same or very close to what the customer is using. As a blogger, if someone tells you your new blog commenting system isn't working in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows, you can test it right away. 

There are several other virtual machine platforms available for OS X, but I stick to VMWare because it's the most stable and reliable. 

Assuming you have a virtual machine running a Windows version on your Mac, you need to test the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 8 (and test in compatibility mode)
• Google Chrome 6
• Firefox 3.6
• Safari
• Opera
• Bonus points for testing IE6 and 7 in separate virtual machines.

Tomorrow I'll start chatting about what tests you should be doing on your blog and website to make sure your site quality is excellent in all browsers. 

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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