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The Page You Requested Might Not Be On This ServerThe newspaper version of this article used to contain a string of Web site URLs. But this site has the same links, and you can click on them rather than typing them into your browser. So after a while, faced with up to 20 links per column, I began simply directing my readers to Lighthouse's URL. From Lighthouse's table of contents, of course, you can jump straight to the current week's article, and from that you can browse straight to whatever takes your fancy. That leaves just one problem: what if I gave you the wrong link to the current week's article? A few weeks ago, just that happened: "Page not found". Several readers e-mailed me to correct the problem - a tiny, almost unnoticeable typo - but for two or three days the link was just dead. I used to check pages in the single-page link-checker on my favorite HTML editor, HomeSite. But a software glitch in the latest HomeSite version has deprived me of the link-checker. Clearly, it was time to check and see how stand-alone link-checkers are performing. The answer came back from Tetranet Software: very well indeed, at least for Windows 95/NT users. Tetranet's Linkbot 3 offers a smooth Windows Explorer-style interface, offers all the configuration options you could want and comes with a straightforward HTML tutorial you can read in your browser. It starts checking a page or an entire site as soon as you type in the URL, and generates a neat, easily read and printed HTML-format report. In my 63-page site with 326 separate URLs, it found 18 bad links in a half-hour of background checking. The only bad news is the price: $US99.95 for the standard version. For a cheaper check, you can try BiggByte Software's InfoLink Link Checker at $US49.95. Slower and slightly less user-friendly than Linkbot, it still gets the job done. Other Web page publishers, such as Microsoft Frontpage and Corel Webmaster Suite, have introduced similar facilities or are planning them (HomeSite co-owner Jeremy Allaire promises HomeSite 3.0's link-checker will be second to none). And Web designers with just a few pages may simply uses the services of Dr HTML, a web-based service which checks single pages for valid links as well as for the validity of their HTML code. But if you have
a growing site and no site-wide
link-checker, you may be foolish to
wait.
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Doctor HTML