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General discussion

Check your Favorites for Free

Nov 17, 2004 10:52PM PST
http://aignes.com/deadlink.htm

This really neat little program will check all the links/urls in your Favorites (works with Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, etc as well) so you can weed out dead links.

You get four messages as it runs for each link in your Favorites list.....OK, Redirected OK, Timeout, and File Not Found.

If the file is OK, you know your link is still good

If the file is Redirected but OK, you know that the original home site has moved the location of the actual page you saved...or the domain location has been changed due to the webmaster switching hosts for the website.

If the file is Timedout, you know that it couldn't complete the connection for some reason.

If the file is File Not Found, it is either because the website closed down and is no longer available or the subpage of the original website has taken down only that page and didn't redirect it to a new location or the file/page just doesn't exist anymore even though the home website is still OK.

So.......you have choices. First click the toolbar link that brings all the File Not Found urls to the top of the list, then hold down the CTRL key, click each one and then delete them all (you have to close your browser to do this ahead of time).

Or you can click one you are pretty sure still has a good home page, and choose Open in The Browser. This will still get you to a crap error page, but then you can edit the URL by backspacing in the address bar to where just the homepage is showing and click Enter. This will take you to the homepage of that particular URL so you can look to see if that file/page you want is still available and then resave with the new URL....and delete the one that gave you the error.

Once you have cleaned up the File Not Found ones, close the program and reopen it. Now run it again....this time many of the Timedout URLS will now start showing up as OK, Redirected but OK, or File Not Found.

Repeat this process a couple of times, especially if you have alot of Favorites you've saved over the years and you will now have a Favorites folder that is up to date with current, good info.

This program also has a Browse button so you can actually use it also for websites you may have and need to check the links on. Even though most web building programs such as Front Page includes a link checker, Front Page checks every link at one time and if your site is large, with lots of links, it can get confusing over what needs to be fixed on which page. This program will let you check individual .html pages making it easier to correct your stuff and keep track of it all. Such as your email address link that might be on every single page of your site....find the error, open Front Page, correct it on one page, and Front Page will offer to replace the broken link with the new one on ALL of the pages of the website all in one fell swoop.

I'm also going to post this in Grif's Computer Tips thread. I just wanted to get your attention about this really cool program. I've used it for a couple of years already and remembered it today.....and cleaned out over 500 broken/bad links already after running it four times to get to the Timedout files. Down from 2200 to about 1600....This also makes it easier to open each Favorites subfolder I have and toss out others manually that I just don't need to have anymore.

TONI

Discussion is locked

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Toni, I've Never Understood That Rationale
Nov 18, 2004 2:25AM PST

Thanks for the great tool, but in my opinion....If you've got "Favorites" that are no longer being used regularly, then they aren't "Favorites" and I clean them out. 2200 Fav's? If you've got that many, it would be hard to remember exactly where each one was placed or what they were called. Except in a few situations, I find it easier and quicker to do a search on Google.

On this machine, I've got about 60 and they all work except for one..LOL...It's called "Toni Hackler's Computer Garden Site" and has been down for quite a while. Did you change servers?. Do you have a link for your website?

Hope this helps.

Grif

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My site
Nov 18, 2004 3:41AM PST

I had a dial up ISP up until June and because as I added pages to my site, it got larger and larger, the ISP wanted $10 per month per 10MB to keep it on their site anymore. Since I refuse to put ads and popup crap on my site and the info there was all free for the taking by any visitor, I couldn't see spending over $60 per month for a site with them.

I went back to Starband satellite modem service and they only give 10MB for a site also, and wanted to charge a bundle for that extra as well, so instead

I've been revamping my site little by little, making it more efficient than I had before (that site was my first attempt at a site and learned alot on the fly), and have been shopping around for a better deal. Wayne has graciously offered his server as a home for me, and once I'm ready to upload it and I know how much room on his server I will eat up, I'll let him make the decision if I've got more than he anticipated and give me a thumbs down or "let's roll".

I'll be emailing you and a bunch of other people with the new location sometime in the next couple of weeks, I hope. If starband will let me be my own server without giving me crap about it, I could set that up easily here with a couple of huge extra harddrives I have. I'm negotiating that possible option now, too.

As for my Favorites, they are all organized by alpha letter and then subfoldered for groups.....pretty organized actually and I use the LINKS toolbar heavily for frequent sites like all the CNET forums.
Quite a few of the old Favorites are links to webgraphics, tips, how-tos, backgrounds, buttons, scripts, etc. that I saved during my web-building and a number of them can be dumped now.

Weeding them all out with the deadlink program has helped me know that I don't have to waste my time checking on some of them just to make sure a site still has what I want. I also just discovered that somewhere along the line ten of my alpha folders got duplicated into another Favorites folder so I was able to delete all of those duplicates and cut it back down again by another 300-400 links. Down to around 1000 now. LOL

TONI

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Re: My site
Nov 18, 2004 6:22AM PST

Toni:

I've been wondering what happened to your site also. I used to visit it often and miss it not being there. Please let us know here in the forum when it will be available again, if that's allowed.

Thank you.

Shirley

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(NT) (NT) Thanks Toni, Let Us Know When You're Up And Running
Nov 19, 2004 8:11AM PST