Conal Tuohy wrote: > Hi David > > When you say "more automation is needed" and "does anyone have a clever > solution", what kind of thing did you have in mind? i.e. What in your > opinion is deficient about the link-checking tools that are currently used?
One deficiency that i see is the issue of tracking the external breaks. If we knew that a particular link was continually broken (say on 3 runs), then we remove it. Otherwise let it pass. LinkAlarm is good, but Cocoon cannot rely on that because its use is an external donation to Cocoon. Perhaps the Cocoon LinkStatus Generator can be expanded to also do external links. However, link robots are an art. For the next while the LinkAlarm reports are available and so we could build upon the new Cocoon Sample which retrieves the concise listing. LinkAlarm only stores one set of reports, so Cocoon would need to store its own copies to retain a history of broken external links. That is no problem, we can manually place them in CVS. Then we would need a Cocoon Generator to compare each links.broken-YYYYMMDD.txt file and alert about the bad ones. This would be a great tool. We use LinkAlarm on our own website. Always too busy to fix them all. With such a tool we could attend to just the bad links. We also need a better way to track which broken links have been fixed, to reduce duplication of effort. --David
