Australian PC World - Easy ways to check your Web page links

Easy ways to check your Web page links

Tip
Keeping all those links on your Web page up-to-date can be a chore. But there are ways to automate at least part of the process.
Head to Doctor HTML (http://www.imagiware.com/RxHTML/). Type in your Web site's URL, and Doctor HTML will head to your Web page and test its links to see which are still active. The program will also check the spelling and HTML syntax of your page and analyse all document, form and table structures. It discovered 39 potential spelling errors and 34 document structure problems on my Web pages -- ouch!
Doctor HTML will even tell you how to optimise the images embedded on your page so they can be downloaded faster. But as thorough as the program is, it won't uncover all the dead links on your page. That's why it's a good idea to download a Perl script -- Perl is a popular language for writing external programs for the Web -- if your Internet service provider lets you run these programs.

Diagnose your Web page ills by calling on Dr HTML

Testlink is a good choice: it's distributed as part of a script library for Web developers at the University of California (http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/libwww-perl/). Upload Testlink to the directory on your Internet service provider's server where your Web page is stored. To run Testlink, go to that directory and type the following command:
testlink inputdoc.html > outputdoc.html
For instance, to check the links in a Web page with the URL http://www.me.com/mypage.html and send Testlink's results to a file called "results", you'd type the following command:
testlink http://www.me.com/mypage.html > results.html
Once Testlink is finished checking the links, access the results page (http://www.me.com/results.html, or whatever you've named it) to see which links are working and which are not.
You can take this one step further and automate the procedure, setting up Testlink to run, say, once a week. But to do so you'll need to talk to your Internet service provider for instructions and for permission to use a Unix utility called Cron -- something system administrators are loath to let customers access because it can be used to send mail bombs.
- Judy Heim

Category: Internet
Issue: Mar 1997
Pages: 192