Friday, August 05, 2005

Link Checking

I told MK I would check all the links on the PSL Web site so I could provide a list of those that were broken. I didn't have an application at hand to do the work, but, luckily, finding a link checker is pretty easy these days. I ended up using the first one I found and I like it. It's fast, and provides a streamlined interface (enter the starting URL and receive a spreadsheet-style output of the results).

Speaking of link-checking ... I have a Firefox extension that'll do it for an individual page. Fairly handy, but I'd been having problems with it not working on our web site. The extension uses the HEAD request verb to determine whether a page is present or not (speeds up the check by not having to download all the data). For some reason every SSI page (that would be every HTML page) on the site would return a 403 error. Turns out that the SSI ISAPI plug-in for IIS by default doesn't allow the HEAD verb. I added it to the list of allowed verbs.

There's no reason that I know to disallow that verb, and it can actually affect the performance of spiders, caches, and browsers. I don't pay much attention to performance with our site since we don't get enough traffic to stress the server, but it's be interesting to see if that has any affect.