welman

The web external link manager

Introduction | Features | Examples | Documentation | Download | Contact

Introduction

If you have a web site and want to make evident the hypertextual links pointing from your site to another site that is considered external, welman can do this work automatically for you.
Welman makes evident the external links embedded in the pages of a web site by inserting a marker image just after the link text. The marker image is selected by the user and usually is a small icon (i.e. ). The program can also check the status of each external link and set two different markers selected by the user: one for ok status and one for broken status (i.e. and external link broken ).
At present, external links are considered those links that have an href url with a non empty network location (blue text): i.e. http://foo.bar/anydoc.html .

Features

Mark only: all external links are marked with ok status image.
Mark only pages modified after last marking.
Check and mark: each external link is marked according to its status, ok or broken.
Clean: restore marked pages to their original content.
Recursive: apply command to files matching the given file name in all subdirectories.
Extensive activity log .
Multithreaded link checker to speed up processing.
Written in Python 2.3 as one file script.
Licensed with GNU General Public License.

Examples

Mark all *.html files in directory /home/myweb with image icon /home/myweb/img/lok.png .

welman -m ./img/lok.png "/home/myweb/*.html"

The same as above but recursive in all subdirectories of /home/myweb .

welman -rm ./img/lok.png "/home/myweb/*.html"

The same as above but ignore pages last modify time: mark them anyway.

welman -frm ./img/lok.png "/home/myweb/*.html"

Mark and check recursively all *.html files in directory /home/myweb with image icon /home/myweb/img/lok.png for ok link status and image icon /home/myweb/img/lko.png for broken link status.

welman -rm ./img/lok.png -s ./img/lko.png "/home/myweb/*.html"

Clean files marked with the above command, reverting them to their original content.

welman -rc "/home/myweb/*.html"

Documentation

usage

welman -c|[-m MARK [-s MARK_BRK]] [-q|-v VERB] file
welman -h|--version

IMPORTANT: If file contains globbing chars (* ? .), it MUST be quoted
to prevent file name expansion by the shell command interpreter.

program options

-c	Clean marked files. Remove any marking icon introduced by -m or -s options. Conflicts with -m and -s options. Implies -f option.
-f	Ignore pages last modify time. Visit them anyway.
-h	Print help text.
-m MARK	External link marker icon. MARK: the file name of the icon inserted by the program just after the external link to mark it. Conflicts with -c option.
-s MARK_BRK	External link status check. For each external link, verify its status (reachable or broken) and set properly its marker icon: the normal icon for a reachable link or the broken link icon otherwise. MARK_BRK: the file name of the icon substituted to the normal icon when a link is checked as broken. Conflicts with -c option. Implies -f option.
-q	Quiet. Suppress normal output messaging, keep error messages.
-r	Recursive. Process given file(s) in the given directory and then do the same recursively for all subdirectories.
-v VERB	Set verbosity level, which type of logged messages that are also copied to program terminal. Levels: 0 no msg, 1 fatals (F), 2 F+errs (E), 3 F+E+warns (W), 4 E+W+normal msg [default=1].
--version	Print program version.

output files

Welman produces two files at each run in the current working directory: the log file welman.log and the data file welman.dat. The log file is a normal text file useful for debug and documentation of run activity. The data file is a data base for internal use. The previous version of these files,if exist, are moved from <filename> to <filename>.<nnn> where <nnn> is the new version number. Welman keeps up to 10 most recent versions of each file.

Download

WARNING: this software is in early beta status, use at your own risk.

welman-0.4	(2004/03/04)	the welman program script, all in one file.
lok.png	(2004/03/04)	external link icon: normal status.
lko.png	(2004/03/04)	external link icon: broken status.

Contact

For questions, comments, corrections, improvements, etc. mail to mxgbot_at_gmail_dot_com.