Built With is a web application that assigns a rating to websites based on the technologies the site is built with. It analyzes things like how you use javascript, if you employ specific frameworks, the character encoding you use, how you use stylesheets, what type of HTML you employ, etc. It takes all these into account to assign a 5-star rating.

Paranoid Agnostic scores 4 out of 5 stars. Why did we score so high? Well, in part because we didn’t leave anything out! Sites score low on the “built-with” scale if they use few different technologies. On this site we use two different javascript libraries, we have widgets, RSS feeds, we make use of good character encoding, CSS is used extensively, and we have a few gimmics.

Sites that score low on the built-with scale seem to have fewer technologies. This is not neccassarily a good rating. A very effective, standards-compliant website (XHTML strict, CSS, and RSS) would score quite low. Whereas a really error-prone messy site (lots of different widgets, bloated javascript libraries, too much privacy invading analytics) would score very high.

So what does this score mean? My interpretation is that the score is trying to measure how “mashup-able” a site is. If a site is built with many different components it scores high. A site that is a mashup, a site that can be mashed-up, a site that wants to flexible over the long term, needs to use the technologies that score highly on this scale. That is not necassarily a bad thing. There is just no measure of how effective those technologies are employed yet.