Sunday, October 30, 2005

Validating Link Rolls

For some time I've been using the del.icio.us link roll script to display links from del.cio.us, and a variety of RSS to javascript services to render arbitrary RSS feeds in my own web pages.

The time has come, however, to stop relying on 3rd party scripts, and to run my own service. A quick trawl of the web turned up several PHP scripts, but I think the one I'll opt for is Feed2JS.

However, as with most of these services, the script is lacking in what I regard as a sensible extension - link checking. After all, why display a link if it's down?

So after another quick trawl, for link checkers this time, I think I'm going to mod this unliked URL checker, which as it stands looks through a list of links extracted from a database, and writes out a list of URLs that are down. The mod will of course just search through the links provided in the link roll, and only write out those that are sound.

There's a lot more can be done to add value to RSS2JS services, I think (at the expense of server load, of course), such as taking into account permanent redirects (as suggested in this blog on link maintenace in blog posts, and which actually quotes from this more comprehensive post on the ideal blog post).

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