[MacPerl] Testing external links

[Brian McNett <webmaster@mycoinfo.com>]

This is an excercise for the reader, as well as my current MacPerl 
project:

Da Boss, that is, my business partner Phil, has asked me to check how 
many of the external links from our site are "bad", that is, return '404 
not found' or some other error page, other than the intended target.  
Sounds simple enough on the face of it.  Alas, Phil seems to be unaware 
that Mycoinfo now has over 3100 external links (it's what we do!), and 
asked me to take a random sample of TWENTY links and extrapolate.

Well, after giving the Ph.D candidate a short refresher on the relative 
merits of proper statistical analysis, I've come to the conclusion that I 
need a TOOL for checking external links.  Further, I see no such tool 
which runs locally on my Mac.

In short, I have a very bad itch, and I need to scratch it.

Okay, here's the details:

The vast majority of links are contained in two sets of pages.  "Archived 
News" pages have filenames which all begin with "archive_"  Internal 
links are all 'relative', (ie: <a href="somepage.html">this is an 
internal link</a>), so we can presume that any occurance of "http:" 
represents something outside the site.

The second set of pages consists of a single file "mycoinfolinks.html" 
and a related directory "mycoinfolinks".

A copy of the site resides in a folder on my hard disk.

No code yet.  I expect to actually get started coding on this in the 
evening.

--B

Brian McNett, Webmaster
*************************************************************
Mycoinfo. The world's first mycology e-journal.
http://www.mycoinfo.com/
*************************************************************


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