14 DAY TRIAL // KLinkStatus is a link checker for KDE. It allows you to search internal and external links in your entire web site, just a single page and choose the depth to search. It supports several protocols such as http, ftp, ssh (fish or sftp) and local files. A number of other protocols are also supported, thanks to its ability to use KIO. KIO (KDE Input/Output) provides access to files, web sites and other resources through a single consistent API. This allows programs that support KIO to operate files stored on remote servers in exactly the same way as they operate on those locally. The ability to use KIO makes KLinkStatus a highly versatile and powerful link checker.
KLinkStatus is part of kdewebdev module for KDE so you'll have two ways of installing it. Either through your package manager by selecting it in the web development group, or by downloading the source code, compiling and installing it. I'm running Fedora core 6 and chose the second method to install. But I got a surprise: a few moments after running 'make', I got an error and the build process exited. Fortunately, it was only a minor bug: the aclocal.m4 file has been generated with version 1.9.3 of automake, while I had version 1.9.6 installed. Although this shouldn't have caused the build process to quit, I finally forced it to continue by editing the aclocal.m4 file and replacing the version numbers.
When the build was finally over, I ran the application by typing klinkstatus in a terminal. Its main window with a basic interface appeared. At first, it looks pretty easy to use, as every function and button is self-explanatory. The upper part of the window had the command section with its well-known menus: File, View etc. Right under the command menu, there's the toolbar with a few buttons, each linked to a separate action. First three buttons allow you to control the checking process by starting, pausing and stopping it. Next is the export button, which enables you to generate a HTML report, once the process is finished. The last three buttons are linked to misc functions: hide the search pane, reset search options and toggle the urls auto-scrol function. Under the toolbar, you'll see the search pane which consists of the search url field and several options. Those options allow you to configure the search process: whether to check pages recursively, whether to check external links, which regular expressions not to check and whether to check parent folders. Once the search process has started, you'll see a list of URLs and their status, as well as the URL labels. You can interact with any of the URLs by right clicking them and choosing whether to edit it in Quanta, Open the URL or referrer in the default browser, copy URL, Referrer link or cell text. Finally, under the URLs list, there's the process status (checking or stopped), a progress bar and the elapsed time.
KLinkStatus can be configured through the configuration dialog, found under the Settings menu. This dialog is divided into three tabs: Check, Results and Identification. From the first tab, you can configure options such as the number of simultaneous connections, timeout, number of items in URL history, toggle recursive and set its depth, toggle checking parent folders and external links and whether to use preview prefix in Quanta. The second tab allows you to change the view: tree or flat, while the third tab enables you to change the identification sent to http/ftp/etc server.
Other features you'll find in KLinkStatus are its ability to use authentication while checking restricted documents, fragment identifiers, tabbed checking, which allows multiple link checking sessions at the same time, filter checked links by good, broken, malformed or undetermined and its good integration with Quanta Plus.
The Good
It's very small, fast, easy to use and it offers a large number of advanced features.
The Bad
KLinkStatus is an application that checks for bad links in a webpage and it does its job very well. Except for the part that it didn't compile flawlessly, I have nothing to complain about. However, it won't hurt if, at some point, this application will offer more advanced searches and checks.
The Truth
KLinkStatus is a fast and easy to use link checker. You can use it as a webmaster or webdeveloper to check any broken links on your site. Too bad regular users can't find a purpose for it, as it's always nice to use clean and easy to use applications.
Check out some screenshots below:
