Xenu link checker 5 years on

Five years ago yesterday I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned Xenu Link Sleuth. I was reminded of this because someone recently commented on another old blog post of mine, about Longhorn Help, saying that a link I'd included to the Longhorn Help reference pages in MSDN was broken.

I thought it would be interesting to check how many other broken links there were throughout my blog. I remembered writing about a link checker and a quick search revealed it was almost exactly five years ago. More interesting though is that the a) the Web page for Xenu looks just as I remember it in 2003 b) you can still download Xenu free of charge c) it runs fine on Vista and d) although it's a no-frills application it's an extremely thorough and effective way to identify broken links buried deep within a Web site. 

One nice feature is that at the end of the check you can output a report as a Web page that contains list of all the broken links and the pages they appear on (which you can click on to check the page) and another list of all the pages containing broken links - it's useful to have both orders because you probably want to check through page by page, but it's also useful to identify multiple broken links for pages on a particular domain.

Download Xenu from here:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

There's an interesting page about The Story of Xenu Link Sleuth which reveals how the program was written by Tilman Hausherr in 1997.

Incidentally, when I ran it against www.itauthor.com today, Xenu reported that I had 2363 links, and just under 200 of them are currently broken: