March 21, 2007 - A New Tool in My Tester's Tool Box - Xenu's Link Sleuth

While demonstrating this tool to a co-worker recently, I realized that I hadn't posted an article on it.  So here goes...

A basic testing step for many web sites is to spider the site and check that there are no broken links.  The simplest way to carry out this test is to use an automated link checker.

Xenu's Link Sleuth is by far my favorite web site link checker.  It's simple to use, fast, and free. 
 
From the web site:
 
Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map
   

Check it out at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Do you have a tester's tool that you really like?
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