Tip #12
Checking links on your site
This is a feature that would more useful as your site gets larger, as more people work on the site, or if you have inherited a site that already exists.
Dreamweaver allows you to check for links that are broken (are not valid on your own site), will give you a list of external links, and identifies orphan files. These checks are done from the files (site) panel or the main document panel. If you have open a specific document and run the link checker, only links on that page are checked. If you are in the files panel , you can highlight (select) the entire site or a selected folder. Probably most of the time you will use the files panel option.
With the website folder selected in the files panel, you could pick File
from the menu bar and then Check Page, then Check Links . Another display appears under the Properties panel, with a green triangle. Select from a drop-down list Check Links for Entire Site (if that is what you want to do), and the report will appear beneath the Properties panel. A report is run for broken
links and appears at the bottom of the screen, under the Properties panel, such as the one below.
In the results panel, there is a drop down list for various reports:
- Broken links are links that no longer follow a valid path or point to a nonexistent file within your site. If you have relative links to pages on your server but not in your site itself, these would be classified as broken links, since Dreamweaver cannot follow the link on your site. However, this option would also find links to pages on your site that no longer exist. Any documents that have broken links can be fixed from this Link checker dialog box by double-clicking on the filename.
- External links are any links that start http://, but also would include any mailto: links on your site, since these are not pages on your site either, even though it might reference legitimate emails.
- Orphan files are files on your site that no longer are being linked to. These files should be deleted.
In order to get a list of orphaned files, in the site panel, you need
to select the folder for the entire site, and right click to bring up
various options. One is Check Links, from which you pick Entire Current
Site.
When the Check link display appears, below the Properties panel, pick the option of Orphan files from the drop down listing, to see a list of files no longer being linked to. If you have inherited a site from someone else, it is useful to look for orphaned files, which might be files still in the folder no longer being used or older versions of files (under some other name). These orphaned files should be deleted, both locally and from the remote server.
These "reports" can be saved by selecting the Save button (referenced in the first screen capture above) and saving the information as a TXT file, for example use a filename of linkerrors.txt and then later open the file in Dreamweaver or your word processor to print it.
These link checking options only check links on your site, and links you have created using relative linking, like by selecting the page using the browse icon in the Properties panel. It does not check links to pages outside your site. However, once your site is posted on a server, there is a free program you can download, install, and the run on your local computer (it if has Internet access). This program has you type in a URL and then it goes to that page, processes all of the links on that page, and then produces a list of links which are okay, links which are broken, and links which have a redirect. You would get this program by going to: home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.
These tips are created as part of a class on Dreamweaver Basics.