Please let me know if there is a better way to do this already but right now here is the problem.
I have a software that crawls our website for errors on demand. The software works great but the issue I’m having is with how Percussion handles broken managed links. When a link is “broken” when the file is deleted it doesn’t actually link the file in preview or on the live website. It just removes the link. When the crawler runs it does not find those broken links as there is no link to actually check.
If we delete something and then run a crawl before we do another full publish that can reveal problems but we wouldn’t know all the files deleted at any time and wouldn’t really want to have to run crawls every hour to double check. Once a full publish occurs we lose the ability to find those errors as the links disappear.
Either having the links not disappear or having some internal Percussion crawler (that crawls all pages on demand) would be great. Not sure how easy the latter would be as even in the previews the links are gone.
Any help is appreciated if you have a solution.
Hi Josh,
Which tool are you using to crawl the published site?
-n
First, you should be seeing a broken link indicator with the latest release in Preview and in the Rich Text Editor or Blog Post. I am going to create a support ticket for that as it appears to be a bug.
I looked at the Inspyder Insite docs and it doesn’t look like they support adding custom http headers to their Spider requests. You would need that from their tool to be able to login to Percussion and Spider Percussion Preview, that be a good feature request for them.
On the flip-side, it looks like they do support reporting of dead links
-n
IMO, I think Percussion should create a new Dashboard Gadget that display broken link (PDFs, Pages, etc.) so I can be aware of it. Right now, there’s no way to know.
That would be a great feature Aaron. At this time I’d be happy with being able to use something external to find errors. If Percussion made deleted items broken links instead of removing them then external crawlers could easily pick those up. I would think that may be less work/have less impact than having to create a new Gadget to report them all. If it isn’t much work then yes! PLEASE DO THAT! :)
Maybe I’m not understanding but I’m not sure how crawling the preview would help either. For me, if I remove from site to archive the page is still linked in preview but if I delete the archived page the link is broken. I have included a video link below displaying that behavior.
http://screencast.com/t/aWLtUsDJZs
So even when crawling the preview website it would not detect the broken link as the text does not appear to be linked.