Recently I was looking for a good link checker and tried Linkbot.
This runs on a PC and you point it at the site you want audited.
It seemed fast and useful but is freeware limited to 1000 links.
The company offers a Web-based site analysis service called
WebXM and recently released a desktop version of same. This
does much more than link analysis; it does all sorts of
content analysis, browser compatibility, etc. See:
http://www.watchfire.com/products/desktop.asp
There is a free trial available. If any MSU Webmasters have
a chance to evaluate this new tool, would you please let
me know your impressions?
Some notes:
-- I pointed it at all of www.msu.edu which seemed to exceed its
capacity.
-- It wants you to view its reports via the Web; no way to
export to HTML or Word. Grrr. But you can download
raw results as CSV files.
-- Norton Antivirus fired up several times during the running.
This puzzled me. The file names appeared to be WebXM
temp files. Their tech support could not diagnose, but
after talking it over in the Computer Lab we concluded
that these are intermediate Web pages under analysis,
and the pages have viruses! Unfortunately there was no
obvious way to map the temp files with their actual URL address.
That last one may discourage some folks from trying the tool out,
but these seem to be HTML viruses that were all trapped. I told
the vendor tech support this needs addressing but they didn't
seem receptive. (It could be a FEATURE to scan your Web space
for viruses.)
/rich
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