Ngrok: easiest way to Tunnel to localhost

Ngrok is a tool that could help you publish your local web so it can be accessed by public. The example use case is when you want to publish your development server, so client or your boss can access it from another place. Yes, it's easy to install your web application to a VPS or hosting server or use VPN remote desktop software (Hamachi or TeamViewer), but it would took some time and probably bigger bandwidth. It's really easy to install ngrok since it's portable (built using Go programming language), in ArchLinux you can type:

yaourt --needed --noconfirm -S --force ngrok

Or you can download the binary from their website. To use ngrok, just type the program name followed with service port on your localhost that you want to publish, for example:

ngrok 8080

After running the program, there would be a link given (HTTP and HTTPS) that can be acessed by public, if people visit that link it would give the same output as http://localhost:8080.

You can view the visit log on the web interface http://127.0.0.1:4040.

If you have already registered to their website you can use subdomain feature, by adding authtoken (get it after registering) for the first time, for example:

ngrok -authtoken ndf8gus0n958t 8080

Then you can use subdomain feature for example:

ngrok -subdomain mysubdomain 8081

This would create a subdomain on Ngrok's domain, for example mysubdomain.ngrok.com that linked to your  http://localhost:8081. One more cool feature about Ngrok is you can replay the request, just press the replay button on the web interface. Minor flaw of this program, if you run multiple instance of Ngrok, only the first instance will get web interface (http://127.0.0.1:4040), the next instance would not get the web interface.

How to Test Speed (and anything else) about your website

There are some tools available to test the speed of your website, for example the built in network tool on your browser. In Chrome you can display it by visiting Menu > More Tools > Developer Tools (or Ctrl+Shift+I) then click on the Network tab, refresh the page, it would show something like this:

For external tools, you can use Pingdom Website Tool. This site could also check DNS, Ping and Traceroute to your hosting server. The speed check interface is quite the same as Chrome's DevTool that you've seen above.

To check broken links, there are some alternatives, one that give the fastest result is BrokenLinkCheck.

Alternatively DeadLinkChecker, but somehow their crawler uses too many wrong method on some links.

To check JavaScripts and Domains your website connected to, you can use URLCheck.

Some other tool to check your XML markup, is the infamous W3C Validator, they also have another tools Link Checker and CSS Validation Service.

To check your site agains search engine (especially Google), you can use Google Webmaster Tool.

Some other tool to check speed and give optimization suggestion are Google's PageSpeed Insight.

Alternatively you can use YSlow, that available via browser's extension or bookmarklet.

Last one, WebPageTest also provide waterfall view of the requested links, just like Mozilla's Firefox Developer Tool (press Ctrl+Shift+C to show it on Firefox).

Well.. that's it, some of the tools available to help you check the speed of your site.