webcheck - a website link checker webcheck was originally named linbot which was developed by Albert Hopkins (marduk) . Versions up till 1.0 were maintained by Mike W. Meyer who changed the name to webcheck, http://www.mired.org/webcheck/. After that Arthur de Jong took up the work and did a complete rewrite, http://ch.tudelft.nl/~arthur/webcheck/. Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Albert Hopkins (marduk) Copyright (C) 2002 Mike W. Meyer Copyright (C) 2005 Arthur de Jong This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA INTRODUCTION ============ webcheck is a website checking tool for webmasters. It crawls a given website and generates a number of reports. The whole system is pluggable allowing easily adding extra reports and checks. Features of webcheck include: * view the structure of a site * track down broken links * find potentially outdated web pages * list links pointing to external sites * do all this periodically and without user intervention webcheck is written in python and is developed on a Debian system with python 2.3. Previous versions of python are not tested but python 2.4 is tested occasionally. Patches to support a wider range of python releases are welcome (provided they are not too intrusive). INSTALLING WEBCHECK =================== Installation is relatively easy. These installation instructions are for Unix-like systems. Other operating systems may differ. 1. Unpack the tarball in the location that you want to have it installed. Maybe something like /usr/local/lib/python/site-packages or /opt. % tar -xvzf webcheck-1.9.?.tar.gz 2. Add a symbolic link to some place in your PATH. % ln -s /opt/webcheck-1.9.?/webcheck.py /usr/local/bin/webcheck 3. Put the manual page in the MANPATH. % ln -s /opt/webcheck-1.9.?/webcheck.1 /usr/local/man/man1/webcheck.1 RUNNING WEBCHECK ================ Executing webcheck without any command line arguments will cause it to give a simple synopsis of its usage and then quit. Giving it the --help option will cause it to print out all command line options. Webcheck writes its reports to an output directory. This is the current directory by default. Running webcheck as something like: % webcheck -o /tmp/myreport http://www.example.com/ Should crawl the site and write the reports to the /tmp/myreport directory. The reports are simple HMTL pages that should look fine with most modern browsers. For more information on webcheck usage and command line options see the webcheck manual page. If the manual page is not in the MANPATH you can probably open the manual with something like: % man -l /opt/webcheck-1.9.?/webcheck.1 FEEDBACK AND BUG REPORTS ======================== If you have any questions about webcheck or would like to report a bug, it helps a lot to include a url where the problem can be found, an HTML file where the error occurs or a (small) tar of the site where the error occurs. Suggestions for improvements are also welcomed. Patches and code contributions are even better. Please send all your reports to Arthur de Jong .