Broken External Link Reports

[mmesarch1]

HI,
Yes I admit I was a Frontpage user.
And now am using Dreamweaver 8.
One of the maintenance tools in Frontpage I miss is the ablilty to check for broken external links throughout my sites.
I have checked and Dreamweaver does not have that capability. I even double checked out on the Macromedia Forums for Dreamweaver and was toldDreamweaver cannot do this.
I looked on the web and found a couple of shareware and fee based tools to do this kind of report. But a little shy about downloading software to try to see if it works.

Does any one have a good recommendation for a tool like this? I am not looking for a one page at a time solution; I am looking for something that can be run monthly or periodically to check the external links for the entire site.

Thanks.

Mark

[saltybeagle]

Dreamweaver can surely handle this....

Choose Window>Results to bring up the Results window. Within this window, choose 'Link Checker,' then hit the green icon that looks like a play button.

Another way is to use the W3's online link checker at: http://validator.w3.org/checklink


The W3C checker gives you a little more info on the status of the links as well... if a link works but redirects to a different page, perhaps you should change it to prevent the redirection delay etc.

Hope that helps.

[mmesarch1]

HI,

Once again I am not looking for a one page at a time solution to checking for broken external links. I am looking for a complete site check. I tried the site http://validator.w3.org/checklink
and just put in the root URL for the site. It only checked the main page of the site ( Index or default or home )

As for Dreamweaver being able to do to this, it cannot. The option that you described checks for broken INTERNAL links only. Not external. Here is what the Dreamweaver Help states ..."The only links that Dreamweaver verifies are links to documents within the site; Dreamweaver compiles a list of external links that appear in the selected document or documents, but does not verify them." I also went out to the Macromedia/ Adobe newsgroups and this was verified. You can get a list of all your external links, but Dreamweaver will not verify them as Frontpage could do.

A shareware packages that was suggested to me was Xenu and and another person suggested Watchfire which looks like purchasable package. Has anyone used these packages or any other out there.

How do people maintain a large site for broken links?

[nhummel]

HI,
A shareware packages that was suggested to me was Xenu and and another person suggested Watchfire which looks like purchasable package. Has anyone used these packages or any other out there.

How do people maintain a large site for broken links?

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/532/

[nhummel]

I should have mentioned that it only works on the page that you are working on.

Ned

[mmesarch1]

HI,
Thanks. That kind of goes with what Brett had suggested.

I am still looking for a utillity that will check all the pages in the website. I don't want to have to go page by page to do the checking.

Mark

[alvin_woon]

yeah, we are kind of looking for the same thing too. Let's hope someone in the websphere can come out with something like that soon.

[nhummel]

http://linkchecker.sourceforge.net/

Features
* recursive checking
* multithreaded
* output in colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, XML or a sitemap graph in different formats
* HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Gopher, Telnet and local file links support
* restriction of link checking with regular expression filters for URLs
* proxy support
* username/password authorization for HTTP and FTP
* robots.txt exclusion protocol support
* i18n support
* a command line interface
* a (Fast)CGI web interface (requires HTTP server)

I haven't tried it. Just found it.

[saltybeagle]

Heard some people recently talking about http://www.linklint.org/

Sounds like it's used by quite a few perl people with a cron job.

[mmesarch1]

Thanks.
I looked at about a dozen or so and Xenu looked good to me too. So thats what I think I am going to use