Sometimes we come across content that resists migration for some reason or another. I've tried to pull together a list of the tools I frequently use to view and check content whenever I see a problem. I hope this list is useful, and hope everybody will post links to THEIR favourite tools below. But for now - here's my starter for ten (all links open in a new window).

First of all, check out the excellent Content Migrator's Cookbook for "recipes" for performing common tasks on content already added to Vamosa. This includes useful Jython scripts and XSL transforms as well as suggestions on connecting to external datasources and more.

Secondly, for viewing content before it's added to Vamosa, consider using the Firefox browser (along with the extensions below). Use Firefox's browser tabs to view and compare pages.

To determine potential Identify issues, use a Firefox User Agent Switcher extension to retrieve pages under a different guise. This allows you to quickly determine if the source server is returning different content based on the connecting browser. (Vamosa identifies itself as "Jakarta Commons-HttpClient/2.0", but we may allow this to be set as a Project setting in the future).

To determine potential content issues, use Firefox Web Developer and Firebug extensions to inspect the content. Also consider using the Firefox HTML Validator extension to review the content, and try the Firefox View Source Chart extension to quickly review the structure of the content. The Live HTTP Headers extension lets you view the headers returned by the server, which is useful for determining character set issues and so on.