Using ColdFusion to check for dead links

[Decus]

Does anybody know if it is possible to write a coldfusion script that could check for dead links externally and internally to the web server. I know this can be done in PERL but can it be done in CF?

 

[cfwoohoo]

There are different ways to handle this.

First you could create a customtag (dll) or use cfhttp, parse out the returned information and look for 404 errors,etc.

 

[Decus]

Cheers cfwoohoo,

Your response sounds very encouraging. However, I'm fairly new to CF, so which of the two possibilities you mentioned would you consider the easiest/most accurate solution and could you provide any pointers of how to achieve this - if this is too troublesome then don't worry about, I appreciate your help up till now.

Thanks again,
Decus

 

[Glowball]

Or do things the easy way and find a free service to crawl your site (admittedly this will only work externally).

http://www.seventwentyfour.com/trial.html

has the best service around, they catch everything. You could also kill two birds with one stone and get free search from

http://www.atomz.com

-- free, excellent search utility and when they index your site once a week you get an error report including dead links and timeouts.

Good luck!