LinkWatch provides a number of features useful either to someone who simply wants to watch some favorite web pages for updates or for a webmaster who needs a tool to monitor for dead links in a large set of web pages.

So far, I have used LinkWatch for both purposes and have debugged and enhanced it as I went along. I have found it quite useful and hope it will be useful to you.

However, some items to note:

• I have tested only on Win 95/98 machines. Although Java is transportable, there may be problems on other platforms that I'm not aware of.
• With the use of the Swing graphical components, the Java virtual machine can take up lots of memory while running. So the performance may be degraded on systems with low memory or while lots of other programs are running.
• The link checking was done only on web pages with standard HTML 1.2 type coding, i.e. no javascripts, style sheets, etc. So there might be problems with more elaborate web pages that I have not coded for.
• In general, therefore, when using LinkWatch to output new html files, e.g. with error and Last Update tags, keep backup copies (or use the "suffix" option to give the new pages different names) and watch for any unexpected alterations in the output.
• Send bug reports or suggested enhancements to me at LinkWatch@hobbyspace.com

Clark S. Lindsey
LinkWatch author

What's New

September 19, 2001:

The download zip file now provides Version 9.4. This new version differs from 9.3 in the correcting of a bug when empty links (i.e. the titles are empty in the hypertext link tags) are given a Last Update tag.

Added menu and toolbar commands for adding the Last Update tag to link titles.

Made toolbar non-floatable.

July 11, 2001:

The download zip file now provides version 9.3. This new version differs from 9.2 in a correction to a bug in the [Last update: ] tag output with long link names. Also, a bug in the [-- error --] tagging for bad links was corrected.

If you suspect that a bad link is just temporarily down (e.g the site is ungoing maintenance), leave the [--error--] tag on the linked text. If the link is still down for the next run with LinkWatch, it will show [--error--][--error--] double tags. This will indicate that the link has been down for two consecutive runs.

Note: if the link is now OK, the program does NOT remove the [--error--]. No modifications are made to good links. You can use your HTML editor to remove the tags as usual.

July 8, 2001:

The download zip file now provides version 9.2. This new version differs from 9.1 in the following:

• URLs with the protocol in capital letter, eg. HTTP, are no longer rejected.
• The log file in the Multi-file Processing now automatically saves a copy to disk as the processing takes place.
  • New processing will be appended to this file unless the "Clear" menu command is chosen or if the Multi-processing dialog is closed.
  • The "Save As" command allows saving the log text to a file of a chosen name.
• If a pathalogical URL of zero length, e.g. href="", is found, the progam hung. This was fixed so that such links are ignored.
• URLs in the link tag must have matching single or double quotes. That is, href="http://www.a.com/" or href='http://www.a.com/' will be accepted but not href='http://www.a.com/".