External link checker, example & instructions.
(add no links to other pages at St.Peters on this page, please)

Instructions for use with Dreamweaver for sites with multiple pages containing external links.

Link Rot is a well-known problem for every website. It can be hard enough to keep track of links within your own webpages, and of course external links are completely out of your control. The actual link checking is done by a free online service called "Link Valet", offered by a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (the people who set the standards for HTML) and may be adapted for use with Frontpage.

If you have only one or two pages with external links the method described below is overkill. Simply copy the address of the online version of your 'links' page and visit "Link Valet"

Using "Link Valet" is a lot quicker than checking every page in your site which has external links by hand. Very tedious, and you are bound to miss some. This may seem a little complex, but it will seem simple after you have worked through it once.You could print out these instructions for your first work through. Creating the initial links list for an existing site is a chore, but thereafter the process is trivial, so long as you remember to update it every time you add an external link to your site.

  1. Keep your link checker web page outside your site folder.
    Start it off by saving a blank html document called linkchecker.html, or you could save a copy of this page to anywhere outside your site folder, (save as 'HTML Source' from your browser), leaving these instructions in place and deleting the links list below in Dreamweaver. When you add an external link to any of your pages, also copy and paste it to the bottom of your link checker page, from layout window, to layout window. You can copy and paste links that look like this. It's the links that are checked, not the visible text.
     
  2. Run Dreamweavers menu "Site" > "Check links site wide" then select "external links" from the "Show:" popup.
     
  3. Open your link checker page, linkchecker.html, in Dreamweaver.
     
  4. " http://..." results in Dreamweavers "Link Checker" panel should match your linkchecker page (they won't if this is your first run through). If not, add/delete the extras in your linkchecker.html page - you can copy the addresses from Dreamweavers "Link Checker" panel. Paste the address as text into the layout window, select the text then paste again into the "Link" box in the "Properties" panel.Click back into the layout window and press return (ready for next entry) to ensure that the link is applied. when finished Save and Close.
     
  5. Move the linkchecker.html document into your site folder
     
  6. Upload linkchecker.html to your online site folder.
     
  7. Copy the online address of your linkchecker page, e.g. for Mr. Rush this would be:
    http://www.stpetershigh.org.uk/DEPARTMENTS/ENGLISH_DEPT/PRUSH/linkchecker.html
     
  8. Go to "Link Valet" (link opens in new window) at http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/valet/
     
  9. Paste the address of your online linkchecker.html into "Check Site;" text box. Click 'OK'.
     
  10. Then... patience grasshopper!... every external page on the list is being spidered
     
  11. Save the results page as a web page (.html document), outside the site folder (Desktop will do nicely), then open in web browser. If you wish to make the addresses in the left column of the saved .html document clickable it is necessary to delete the line which begins "<base href="http://www.htmlhelp.com..." in the <head> section of the HTML code.
     
  12. re-open your linkchecker.html page in Dreamweaver
     
  13. in the results page, look for the addresses on the left with no link - those are the bad ones
     
  14. use Dreamweavers "Link Checker" panel to open your web pages (double click file address on the left side of the panel) with bad links, then delete or modify the bad links. The pages open with the bad link hilited in the code and/or layout window.
     
  15. In Dreamweaver, delete or modify the corresponding entry in your linkchecker.html page
     
  16. When finished, save, close & remove linkchecker.html from your site folder to your websites 'working files' folder