Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) augmented the blazing speed of LinkScan’s external link checking with new processes that greatly increase its speed validating internal links.
CPU usage has been reduced by 30 to 50%, and elapsed time to check a site has been cut nearly in half over earlier versions of LinkScan.
Elsop has also added the ability to validate FTP links and added syntax checking of mailto links. Another important new feature is the “All Pages Linking To …” Report. This report helps webmasters quickly identify the impact of removing a document or file by listing all of the pages that link to it.
Other new features in version 4.1 include support for server-side image maps, support for the HTTP Proxy-Authenticate feature and some new error conditions such as the additional status code “Location Header Not Absolute” and the status code “URL Contains Unsafe Character”. The latter code indicates a link contains an ‘unsafe’ character; probably a control character or a non-encoded space (spaces in URLs should be written as “%20”).
Designed to work on both Internet and intranet servers, LinkScan can test over 40,000 links per hour, according to Elsop. The tool has successfully worked on Web sites with over 250,000 pages and more than 50,000 external links, making it the pre-eminent tool for intranets.
Free, fully functional evaluation copies of LinkScan 4.1 may be downloaded (less than 240 Kbytes) online.