Linkbot Pro 4.0:
The Best Gets Better
(Part 2)
By David Fiedler
All about those new features
Linkbot Pro's new features address the kinds of improvements that Webmasters
and serious developers will applaud:
Speed enhancements: up to 30 threads can be activated at once, which
really helps with large sites. I was able to check all of WebDeveloper.com --
including external links -- in about 50 minutes on a 56 kbps line, which is pretty
good when you realize that there are almost 5000 links to check.
Also, one of the problems I had with Linkbot 3.6 was that it was unable to
even process our site correctly...it would hang up at the end, unable to kill
its threads, usually forcing me to kill the entire process and thereby losing
the results of an entire two-hour run. This problem seems to be gone in Linkbot
Pro 4.0...I even ran a "torture test" of using the new Linkbot while
a massive (75 MB) FTP download was running, and no problems were encountered.
Orphaned files: Linkbot Pro will detect "orphan" files that
it doesn't believe are referenced by any HTML pages. While this can be useful,
you shouldn't start deleting files from this particular report's results without
careful thought, since Linkbot can't detect if a file is being included by SSI
or referenced by a CGI or Java applet.
HTML syntax validation: powered by the same validation engine found
in Allaire's HomeSite 4.0,
Linkbot has the capability to check a single page for HTML problems, or a batch
of them. But because you can't do much in the way of editing through Linkbot,
this isn't quite as useful for practical purposes as it is with HomeSite. And
a sitewide report of HTML syntax errors is even more daunting and depressing than
a report of broken links.
FrontPage integration: now this is more like it! With the touch of a
button in Linkbot setup, it installs itself into the FrontPage toolbar, where
you can launch a Linkbot run against whatever FrontPage site you have open at
any time. Although the integration doesn't work completely in both directions
(you can't launch the FrontPage editor directly from Linkbot once you find a page
there with errors), it's still trivial to double-click the appropriate filename
in FrontPage Explorer to bring up the editor.
Local trouble: ever go to someone's site, click on a link, and get a
404 because the URL said something like "file://D:/mysite/pictures/girlfriend.jpg"?
Linkbot helps you avoid this and similar embarrassing problems by specifically
scanning for and reporting on "file:" URLs.
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