LinkScan

LinkScan Reference Manual

Section 5

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Basic Scanning with the Windows Graphical User Interface

This section describes how to create, configure and scan a LinkScan Project using the Windows graphical user interface.

Creating a New Project

  1. From the Main LinkScan Window, select an existing Project from the displayed list of Projects and click New.

  2. You will be prompted for a Project Name, Description and Organization.

  3. The new Project will be created by cloning the originally selected Project (or the default Project if none was selected).

Configuring a Project

  1. From the Main LinkScan Window, select an existing Project from the displayed list of Projects and click Edit.

  2. On the Edit Project Dialog you must:

    Scanning Method: We recommend that you use the Network (HTTP) Scanning method, at least initially. This method is frequently the most appropriate and is also the simplest to configure. Optionally, you may also configure LinkScan to check for Orphaned Files but this requires a more detailed knowledge of your server environment and again we suggest you defer this until you are more familiar with LinkScan.

    In many cases, using the Network (HTTP) Scanning method, you will only need to supply the URL of the target website for LinkScan to complete a full analysis. Later, you may wish to explore the Orphaned File and File System Scanning and Import Scanning. capabilities of LinkScan.

    Review the status of the Case Sensitive Pathnames checkbox. This tells LinkScan whether to treat index.html and INDEX.HTML, for example, as a single file or two different files. In general, this box should be checked when scanning websites hosted on Unix servers and unchecked when scanning websites hosted on Windows servers.

    Also note the status of the Onlyinclude setting. Typically, this will be blank. However, if you enter a URL such as:

    http://www.example.com/Products/index.html

    LinkScan will automatically enter Products/ in the Onlyinclude box. This means that LinkScan will only scan the Products/ area (and below) of the website. It will not travel up to the root of the site and down into other regions. Simply clear the contents of the Onlyinclude box if you want LinkScan to explore the entire website. Many other features available to control the scope of a scan are described later in this document.

  3. Click OK to save the settings or Cancel to discard them.

Some users will find it instructive to explore the Advanced button on the Edit Project dialog box. This will open a Notepad window onto the configuration file associated with the selected Project (e.g. C:\LinkScan\someproject\linkscan.cfg). This will display the current configuration as it is stored by LinkScan. You may need to edit this file later to customize LinkScan and enable certain specific features. Note that lines starting with a pound sign (#) are comments. You will also find comment lines describing very briefly (as an aide memoir) each of the available customization commands. More detailed documentation is provided later in this manual.

Scanning a Project

  1. From the Main LinkScan Window, select an existing Project from the displayed list of Projects and click Scan.

  2. LinkScan will display the Scanning Dialog which enables you to monitor progress as the scan proceeds. On the progress display, note the distinction between Documents and Links.

  3. On completion of the scan, the Cancel button will change to an OK button and the system will beep. Press the OK button to dismiss the Scanning Dialog box.

You have now completed a scan of the website and LinkScan has created a Database for that Project. Next you will want to examine the findings by following the steps described in Viewing the Results.

LinkScan Reference Manual. Section 5. Basic Scanning
LinkScan Version 9.0
© Copyright 1997-2001 Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop)
LinkScan™ and Elsop™ are Trademarks of Electronic Software Publishing Corporation

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