DeepTrawl Helps Webmasters Find & Fix Site Errors Quickly, Simply
As much fun as we all have poring over lines of code every time an anonymous commenter alerts us to a broken link, missing image, or misspelled word, small-potatoes page edits are hardly the most enjoyable part of running and maintaining a website.
A new tool called DeepTrawl allows site owners to proactively find such errors, then highlights the relevant bits of code in a proprietary editor where webmasters can edit and save their files in seconds. Especially for those who maintain multiple sites, this service could prove invaluable. Although the options are sophisticated, it's the app's speed and simplicity that impress us most.
DeepTrawl identifies misspellings, broken links, and missing images. It can also find pages that load slowly or spammy/offensive comments. Searches can be timed and automated, as well. The company's demo video demonstrates a few of the functions in detail.
We tested the app on a site I built and maintain for a writer friend, and here's what we experienced:
Although the web browser view was nice (it gave us a split screen reminiscent of Dreamweaver), the DeepTrawl editor was ridiculously quick to use and made us think to ourselves, "This is the way web editing should be." The most difficult part of the process was remembering the site's FTP password.
Currently, the app is available for Windows and Mac only. Sorry, Linux friends. You'll have to resort to your Other Box of Shame for this one. Licenses are available from $49 to $299, depending on the number of pages to be trawled.
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Seems cool, gonna test it for my blog.
This is great! Do you know of one that also checks for grammar errors?
DeepTrawl is an invaluable tool. I've used it in the past to dig around sites to look for sensitive information (credit card, Social Security numbers) during security sweeps.
Why not just use W3C's link cheker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) ? Yeah, it doesn't do spell checking. but it's free. and open source...
Great article Jolie. I'm gonna try it.
Linkpatch is an online tool meant for anyone that develops, oversees or works on a website. The purpose is simple: it sends you an email whenever someone encounters a 404 page (or other error pages, for that matter) on your website.
http://www.linkpatch.com
Get a free 5-site acct:
http://is.gd/RF3Z
That looks like a great program. I am always trying to fix errors on the fly, and it takes forever.
Thanks for the review.
Let me try this out.. seems pretty interesting and it will save max of my work...
Thanks for the great article.
There are a few web master tools out there for checking websites. I wonder how better this could be.....