On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 05:43:25PM +0200, Alexander Skwar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 39 lines which said:
> Does somebody know of a "link check service" for del.icio.us? I just released mine: http://www.bortzmeyer.org/disastrous.html A feature often requested by del.icio.us users is the ability to check periodically the links they bookmark to detect the broken ones (domains which disappeared, files that were moved or removed, etc). Although, in theory, Cool URIs don't change (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI), in practice, it is not always the case. The best place to put such a link checker are certainly inside del.icio.us itself. It could use the Yahoo Web crawlers to do so, since del.icio.us is now a subsidiary of Yahoo. But such a service does not exist yet, may be because the two systems are not actually merged. So, in the mean time, several link checkers have been written (see the del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/help/thirdpartytools) list or at the end of this article). What is the point of a new one, my *disastrous* program? * free software ("free as in free speech, not free as in free beer"): source code available and you can modify and redistribute it. * designed to be run unattended (typically from cron on an Unix machine). Several of its competitors can run only on the desktop, under the control of an human user. * has a memory: it stores locally the result of the tests (in a SQLite database) and declares a link broken only after N tests in a row failed (N is configurable). It would be very bad, IMHO, to declare a link broken if there was only a temporary network glitch. * tag the broken links. This is the most del.icio.us way to report a problem. You can retrieve *disastrous* here: (http://www.bortzmeyer.org/files/disastrous.py). To install it, you need a Python environment, the SQLite database and the pysqlite (http://initd.org/pub/software/pysqlite) Python module. Then, run it with the -h option to get help. *disastrous* depends on a configuration file, ~/.disastrousrc. A typical content is: [disastrous] # Your account at del.icio.us name = smith password = MySecretPassword # The other options have sensible default values (displayed in the comment) # but feel free to change them # The string to use for tagging # broken_tag = "broken" # The number of tests failed in a row before we declare the link broken # failed_tests_required = 3 # etc If you run it from cron, as recommended, a possible configuration is: 30 3 * * * disastrous.py -d 2 It will run *disastrous* every day at 3:30 with the debug level set to 2. As far as I know, here are its competitors (they do not seem to be listed at http://del.icio.us/help/thirdpartytools): * Dead.licious (http://www.malarkeysoftware.com/projects_dead-licious.html). Only for MacOS. Apparently non-free. * post checker (http://www.tiede.dk:8080/roller/kim/entry/del_icio_us_post_checker) Written in Java. Free and the code is available at http://code.google.com/p/delicious-post-checker/downloads/list. * Fresh delicious (http://freshdelicious.googlepages.com/). Non-free, it seems. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
