Re: Checking HTML links

[Beth Mazur <mazur -at- MAYA -dot- COM>]

At 2:33 PM -0600 1/23/97, geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA wrote:
> Chris Hamilton wondered how to verify the validity and
> completeness of HMTL links.

I hesitated to respond to this initially, because frankly, I suspect
that any tool that verifies that a link actually goes to the "correct"
file rather than simply the "named" file will be commercial (read
pricy) software.

However, I thought I'd mention what I use for my sites. I have a couple
of web sites that provide links to other sites. One of these sites has
several hundred links. Clearly this was more than I wanted to maintain
by hand. I found a tool called MOMspider, which traverses the links
from a root node and reports back with results that show broken and
redirected links. I did have to tweak it a bit to prevent it from
traversing sites other than mine (i.e., I didn't need it to report on
the thousands of pages at Yahoo, only that the first Yahoo link was
valid).

For more info, check out http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/MOMspider/.

Beth Mazur
mazur -at- maya -dot- com

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