Linkbot for Windows 95

For many webmasters, the most difficult and frustrating aspect of maintaining a website is not continually updating it with new information, but instead trying to ensure that existing information remains accurate. Large web sites often have upwards of ten to twenty thousand internal and external links; manually verifying even a small portion of these links quickly becomes a Herculean task. Thankfully, tools that automate this process now exist, and of these tools, Linkbot is one of the best. Like InContext's WebAnalyzer (another web analysis tool), Linkbot will scan entire web sites for you and produce reports that detail broken links, missing images, pages with stale content, orphaned (unused) files, pages with slow download times, and much more. The client can also be set up to run on an automatic basis in order to ensure your web site's reliability on a consistent basis. Linkbot uses an Explorer-like interface to help you explore and visualize the overall structure and organization of your website. Links into (parent) and out of (child) individual pages can be viewed using this interface, and filters can also be set up to analyze subsections of the site. Once a site has been analyzed, you can either continue using the Explorer style interface or you can publish your report to the web. Linkbot's web report capabilities are especially impressive as well as easy to use. Individual reports that detail your web site are automatically created once Linkbot completes its initial analysis of your site. A top-level site summary provides access to more in-depth reports for eight different Linkbot areas: Warnings (pages with automatically redirected links), Broken URLs (a listing of moved or removed links organized by type of URL error), Broken Pages (a listing of broken URLs sorted by individual web page), What's New (pages with content that has been revised within a user-configurable time frame), What's Old (a similar report for pages that haven't had their content updated within a given period), What's Slow (a report of large pages that take a long time to download), Orphaned URLs (a listing of files on your remote site that are no longer needed), and an Image Catalog (a complete thumbnail collection of your site's images). The web reporting tool should be reason enough for the majority of webmasters to want to fork over the registration fee ($199) for continued use of Linkbot, but the client's feature-set definitely doesn't stop short there. Unlike some web analysis tools, Linkbot doesn't try to do too much at the expense of its primary focus. Linkbot's sole purpose is the analysis of websites, and as a result it delivers nearly every imaginable feature possible in this area. Linkbot really shines when it comes to multi-tasking (you're given the option of allowing from 1 to 20 processes to run concurrently), link verification (support for a wide variety of links including web, FTP, mail, image, multimedia, and applet), configurability (tons of customizable options that make it possible to generate reports that meet your most critical needs), and the aforementioned web reporting capabilities. While InContext's WebAnalyzer can be purchased for much less ($79.95), Linkbot is more efficient (thanks largely in part to its impressive multi-tasking capabilities), more flexible, and overall, more useful. Because of its narrow focus, you won't be able to download entire sites with Linkbot or use the client as a search engine, but you will have every imaginable tool available to you for analyzing your web site. Overall, this is a must-have client for any webmaster who wishes to keep his or her site as error-free as possible. Nothing less should suffice, and for this reason, The CWSApps List is proud to display its own 'Verified by Linkbot' button. Pros: Tons of features and customizable options, automated web analysis, excellent reporting capabilities Cons: Primarily of use only for webmasters, expensive relative to WebAnalyzer, some bugs do exist Version Reviewed: 3.0a (Build 92) Date of Review: 4/28/97 For the latest information on Linkbot, check out: http://cws.iworld.com/32agents.html#linkbot