HTML LinkChecker is a neat little friend that keeps an eye on your webpages to find incorrect links and links to pages that does no longer exist. Maybe you've typed the wrong URL in the HTML-source, or maybe the linked page has been moved or deleted. It's a dirty job to search your site regulary, but with HTML LinkChecker, you don't need to do all this by hand. Just set it to search the first page of your site, and within a few minutes (depending on the number of pages), you will have all possible problems listed right on the screen. And by a single click with the mouse, you can even edit and correct the errors within the program. Or print or save an easy-to-read list of the problems.
HTML LinkChecker searches for broken links in a dozen of tags. It will find broken links, missing pictures, bad imagemaps, wrong anchors, and more. It will search on your local disk fast and easy, and do asynchronous connections to the Internet to check remote links too. It can check files that are already opened in another program without problem. It can read files bigger than 30 K, for example the bookmark-file of yout favorite web-browser. Save your visitors for “broken-image”-icons and 404-errors!
What it can't do
Skip the commercial, what's the disadvantages of the program? Well, there are some actually. The program will only check external files on HTTP-servers, not for example links to FTP-files or email-addresses. (FTP-links is an idea for future versions though). It will only test the anchor on local pages (like “file.html#anchor”) and not on external pages (like “http://www.server.com/file.html#anchor”). It will automatically find out the new URL of moved pages, if available, but most webmasters puts a page like “This page has moved to ...” on the old URL instead. HTML LinkChecker does not understand that, actually... :-)
What it cost
HTML LinkChecker is shareware. If you like it and use it, if it saves you time or money, or if you just feel generous to a seventeen years old programmer, there is a $5 fee for it. For the double, $10, you've even paid for all my programs. A pretty good business, I'd say. There is an entire chapter later in this documentation which you can read, but by now, please just remember that this isn't free stuff. Someone have actually spent days (read nights..) to make it work.
Updates and information
More information and new releases can be found at http://www.calles.pp.se/nisseb/html_linkchecker.html (command-click to go there). To get the newest news first, it is a good idea to subscribe to the free mailing list. This can be done at http://www.calles.pp.se/nisseb/ where you also may find information about a couple of other useful software from the same author (that's me). If someone, by some reason, ever wondered who've made all this stuff, I've a private page too at http://www.calles.pp.se.
Distribution
If you like the program, please copy unmodified copies of it anywhere. If you wish to add it onto a CD or other physical disk, or distribute it with a magazine or book, please send me an email about it. I'd kindly receive a copy of the book/cd/magazine (specially in foreign languages, it's always exciting!), but except that I've nothing to object about it. But if you distribute the program on cd:s and similar without letting me know, Santa won't be happy on you...
The author
...can preferable be contacted on the net, at mailto:carl.backstrom@gfk.se or on the www at http://www.calles.pp.se. Snailmails, cd:s, gifts and payments would suitably be adressed to
Nisseb softwares
Hackspettsgatan 8
SE-412 70 Göteborg
Sweden
Known bugs and problems
The program seems to eat memory in some situations, but I have only noticed this on a 68 K-Mac. If possible, locate a few extra Mb's of RAM when running on a 68 K-machine. There is also a few things to note about TCP handling, see the TCP-notes chapter for information. The future hopefully includes better printing dialogs, drag-and-drop of files into the program window, and the feature to check ftp-links (anonymous FTP only, if then). Please drop me a line if you have ideas or suggestions for coming releases!
Less interesting
The story about this program originally started in 1996, when I just had an account for free at GeoCities (http://www.geocities.com). I needed an utility which scanned the pages for broken links, so I made a simple program for this. It could only search local links and only files in the same directory, but it was enough. I released it to the net anyway, and after a while I got feedback and suggestions from users whp asked for a new version. Unfortunately it took a while, but now it's finally available.
There is faster and better solutions, and there are those mumbo-jumbo programs which draws graphical sitemaps, makes meta-files and so on, but most of them are pretty expensive.
