Link checking metadata

(Ben Chapman) #1

For years I have been checking for broken links on my site using a links report, blithely assuming that it would be looking at the front end of my site and checking all the links that show up there. It came to me in a sudden realisation that the links report is looking at the assets from the back end, not at the actual live pages.

 

I have one quite important page on my site that consists of a listing of groups and their contact details. The page is an asset listing and the contact details are stored as metadata in the assets to be listed. This means that the – potentially broken – links are stored as metadata and aren’t checked by the links report.

 

Is there a tool in Matrix that I can use to check my site for broken links that would pick up links stored in metadata but displayed on the front end?

(Joel Porgand) #2

Personally I use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links.

(Tim Davison) #3

It's an odd behaviour I've noted before, that links created in metadata WYSWIYG fields do not get tracked in Matrix's internal linking system.  Makes some things very difficult.

 

What JP says - what you're looking for is a web crawler independent to Matrix.  Xenu is good but I found it struggled with internal and secured sites (such as intranets).  There's online ones that will do it remotely for you (for a fee) but again these usually only work for publicly accessible sites.  To get maximum flexibility I ended up writing my own (2 actually, one that does a full crawl every night and generates a report, and another one that checks the current page within the browser that I give to authors/publishers to use).