Hi.
There is an excellent website that I would like to emulate some of the characteristics of in a website that I hope to develop. (I do not intend my site being in competition with them - mine would be more of a social networking site). Can anyone tell me if it is possible to detect which script and platform is being used on www.shoutlife.com? I have very little programming or website building experience so am considering using phpfox as my solution. Thanks in advance.
EBS
I can only tell it's hosted with Apache by checking the HTTP headers.
It didn't respond to appending ?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42 to a URL, so it may not be created with PHP. However it is trivial to turn expose_php off in php.ini.
By the look of the .cfm extension, some at least is (probably) written in Cold Fusion.
Short of any other telling signs (e.g. a "powered by [insert system name here]" comment in the footer) one option is to examine the source code or HTTP headers. For example, the MODx content management system inserts a "MODX_MEDIA_PATH" variable into the Javascript output. The BBC website uses an in-house created system which inserts a version number into a comment somewhere in the source code.
You can also look at the page URLs providing the site is not using any rewriting technologies. ASP.NET-based systems prior to version 3.5 end their URLs with ".aspx." shoutlife.com uses ".cfm" which is Cold Fusion.
If the website is powered by PHP, and the option has not been disabled by the site administrator, PHP inserts a PHP version number into the HTTP headers. ASP.NET inserts a "X-Powered-By: ASP.NET" header into the response headers.
You can use something like the Firebug add-on for Firefox to view the request and response headers. As for shoutlife.com, there are no telling signs in the source code or HTTP headers so it is likely a home-brew solution.
The site is using the Apache web server. The programming language used on the site is ColdFusion and the main language used for the site's textual content is English. Shoutlife.com is using the javascript libraries jQuery and QuantServe. The server that hosts shoutlife.com is located in Minneapolis, United States and is running Linux (CentOS). The server is located on the Honeycomb Internet Services network. Shoutlife.com is using Google Adsense for monetization and Google Analytics for statistics.
(I dont know much.... but sometimes i can find things)