LinkBot?

[ritualcoffee]

who owns this little sucker?

[Air]

It could be anybody, it's a personal link validator and can scan pages for a multitude of things including 404's, java script, dead links, etc.

[mark roach]

Has anyone got an example of a bit of perl that might do this. I would like to feed a program a list of URLs to firstly check they exist and secondly check if they have a link back to me. A bit like a cut down version of Brett's Sim Spider :)

[ritualcoffee]

thanks air! at least it isn't a download tool! ;)

[littleman]

Mark, are you looking for a bot that will go through an entire web site or just a script that will extract links from one page?

[mark_roach]

The script would take a list of URL from a database and firstly verify that they exist, secondly it would check that there was a link back to my site on the page.

I have found a snippet of code that will nearly do the job and am currently coding up the solution. I will post it up here if anyone else is interested.

[littleman]

Okay, if you are on it that's cool. Otherwise, I have code that will do that. I'd have to combine it in the right way for you, though. That is why I asked if you were looking for something that would crawl a site (bit more coding) or just check a single url from each site. It is always nice to look at someone else's code, so if you are interested in posting it I'd be interested in seeing it.

Are you using HTML::LinkExtor or doing it by parsing the html yourself?

[mark_roach]

I used HTML::LinkExtor (when I finally got it to work!). This was my first attempt a writing a spider. I reckon it would only take a couple more lines of code to get it trawl the whole web looking for links to my site. Get ready to add "Champdogs Link-Validator" to your robots.txt :)