Re: How to implement link checking in the content a CMS stores

Austin, Darrel wrote:
> I'm guessing the weak link here is storing URIs as hard-coded in the HTML.
> Are there practical alternatives to that? 

You have to have some way to refer to a page -- a URI is as good as 
anything, IMHO.  It's better to keep the URIs stable (including using 
redirects) than put a lot of effort into making something more abstract 
than a URI.

> If not, are there any products out
> there that folks would recommend that would scan the site externally looking
> for bad links? 

I use webcheck sometimes, which is open source and produces OK output: 
http://mired.org:8080/webcheck/ -- it's in Python, but if you are 
comfortable doing a bit of installing it can be run on Windows without a 
problem.  It creates a directory of HTML files to report on the results.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  [email protected]  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org