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LinkScan 3.2: Multiproject enhancements added for multiple site maintainers
Gardnerville, NV, September 2, 1997 - Electronic Software Publishing
Corporation (Elsop) introduces a number of new features in LinkScan
version 3.2 that greatly enhance its power and flexibility for checking
very large internet and intranet websites. LinkScan 3.2 has facilities
for Webmasters to quickly and easily maintain multiple Projects on a
single server. A Project is defined as a set of configuration and data
files stored in a LinkScan subdirectory. This powerful capability is
extremely useful in a number of different situations:
- To split-up very large sites into smaller sub-sites that can be tested
more quickly and generate smaller (more managable) reports.
- To split-up large sites so that different reports can be created for
different departments and/or people that are responsible for the
maintenance of sub-sets of the site.
- To configure LinkScan to handle multiple domains hosted on a single server.
Most of the following new features are designed to make it easier, faster,
and more flexible to configure (and maintain) LinkScan especially for
large and complex web sites or Intranets where many people are responsible
for the maintenance and content.
- LinkScan automatically creates template for new Projects.
- Added new 'Hostalias' directive to linkscan.ign file for use with servers
that have multiple identities.
- Added new 'Noprojectlist' directive to linkscan.sys file.
- Added new !HOME expression to 'Alias' directive in linkscan.ign.
- The LinkScan configurator will move CGI files to a 'cgi-bin' directory and
update the '$Lsdir' parameter automatically.
- LinkScan database is created in a temporary working directory so that
previous reports remain available during scanning
- Added support for a new Global 'linkscan.ign' file
Don't get caught with your links down
Our studies show that most websites have major problems. These include
up to 30% of the external links being broken along with missing files
and orphaned pages. Why? Because it's just too time consuming and
difficult to quality assure a large website manually and other programs
have been too slow and cumbersome to use.
The solution is to use a powerful automatic link validator to test every
link on your website. LinkScan is the answer. It is the most thorough and
fastest quality assuarance tool available for this task. LinkScan is
essential to a professionally managed web site. It's also easy to use
because it sets up all directories and permissions and builds your
configuation file automatically. Most first time users have LinkScan
installed and running in minutes.
Designed to work on both internet and intranet servers, LinkScan can test
over 40,000 links per hour because it is the only link checker that uses
multi-threaded simultaneous processing. Linkscan has successfully worked
on websites with over 80,000 pages and more than 50,000 external links
making it the pre-eminent tool for intranets.
LinkScan also produces two revolutionary types of maps of websites.
LinkScan's SiteMap enables the user to produce a site map that includes
every link on a website arranged in a hierarchical format that resembles
a book's table of contents. LinkScan's TapMap is an expandable and
collapsible site map that allows viewers to tap down through the various
and multiple levels of a website to quickly and easily navigate and
explore the website by tapping on a few control icons.
LinkScan is being used by such large and diverse organizations as
Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Sun Microsystems, the University of Cambridge (UK),
the United States Department of Defense, the Vancouver Public Library
(Canada), the California Institute of Technology, Australia's Commonwealth
Department of the Environment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Webmedia (UK), Brown University, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, The MITRE Corporation, and the Ford Motor Company.
The message to Webmasters is: "Don't get caught with your links down. Don't
let your visitors think your site sucks! You can now identify and fix those
problems today." LinkScan automatically validates the links on a web site
with the following powerful capabilities:
- Internal Testing Features
- Scans for missing HTML documents, images and other files
- Validates all internal hyperlinks
- Validates all hyperlinks embedded within Adobe Acrobat PDF files
- Checks all name tags and references
- Discovers orphaned files
- Creates two types of site maps
- External Link Testing Features
- Servers that are not found (no DNS entry)
- Documents that are not found
- URL's that have relocated
- URL's that cannot be accessed (e.g. unauthorized or forbidden)
- URL's that time out
- Power and Performance Features
- Benchmarked at over 40,000 links checked per hour
- Can easily check websites with 50,000 or more external links
- Quickly tests sites with over 80,000 pages
- Multi-threaded simultaneous processing checks up to 60 links concurrently
- Unique blend of File System and HTTP navigation for link testing
- Scalable to any size web site and multiple sites of any size
- Support of server aliases and server redirections
- Facility for web access via a Proxy Server
- Analyze dynamic pages created on-the-fly by CGIs, ASPs, and RDBMSs
- Smart Probing of remote links for ultra-high accuracy
- Links history helps avoid over frequent testing of external links
- Control features for reduced processing of duplicate links
- Efficient online interactive processing produces reports very rapidly
- Convenience and Efficiency Features
- Restart facilities to recover from system incidents during testing
- Features for retesting only the problem links for managed maintenance
- Test only internal links or all links at your option
- Control options to limit the frequency with which external links are tested
- Randomized testing of external links to avoid load peaks on remote servers
- Scheduled periodic overnite processing for regular site maintenance
- Easy to check password protected pages through realm definition
- Reports may be generated from the command line or GUI (cgi) interface
- Previous reports may be accessed while database is being updated
- Multi-site Management Features
- Designed for the professional management of internet and intranet websites
- Multi-site manager for mutiple sites or sub-sites on a single server
- Features that allow for support of sections by multiple maintainers
- Automatically creates template for new Projects
- Supports servers that have multiple identities with 'Hostalias' directive
- Default configurations
- Site Management Features
- Preventative maintenance now possible through reports on redirected links
- Facilities to maintain the history of each tested URL
- Case-sensitive search engine for the LinkScan History Report
- Automatic purge/expire of URL history information
- One file contains all URLs for site for easy submission to search engines
- Reporting Features
- Comprehensive reporting via a forms-based web browser
- Reports include links to the target and source documents to aid follow-up
- Reports that focus on specific problems for faster repair of vital items
- Overview by Web Page Report with links to Error Reports for each page
- Ad hoc custom reports created on the fly from your browser
- All reports viewable by web browser from Netscape Navigator 1.2 and up
- LinkScan is Lynx friendly!
- Platform Features
- Operates on virtually all Unix operating systems
- Operates on Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
- Highly scalable for any web server environment
- Web Site Mapping Features
- SiteMap
- The SiteMap is a hierarchical display like a book's table of contents
- You may create SiteMaps for your entire websites and/or sub-directories
- Customization features to make your SiteMap best display your website
- The SiteMap also highlights NEW pages added within a defined period
- Convenient features allow for easy set up of SiteMap in frames
- Ideal for websites with up to 400 pages
- TapMap
- The TapMap is an expandable and collapsible drill down map
- Link from a page with that page as the central starting point on the TapMap
- Easy and instant display of any part of the entire structure of a site
- Webmaster may disable display options for safe end-user use
- Excellent for small sites but designed for websites with 1,000s of pages
- Ease of Installation and Use Features
- Small setup file (around 160K bytes) takes only seconds to download
- Configurator Program automatically generates configuration control file
- Automatically updates the "#!/usr/local/bin/perl" headers in the LinkScan executables
- Automatically creates directories & sets files/directories permissions
- Automatically move CGI files to a 'cgi-bin' directory and
- Automatically updates the '$Lsdir' parameter in the moved file
- Hyperlinked documentation and a comprehensive hyperlinked FAQ
- Brief Startup Guide for easy installation and operation
- Ease of Acquisition Features
- Free evaluation of fully functional copy for 15 days from download
- All major credit cards accepted on our secure server
- Purchase Orders and Payments by Check cheerfully accepted
- Value priced to be affordable for all who require a quality web site
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