Comment by schwag09 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by schwag09 | Hacker News Reader

Project: R.I.P.Link - a tool for finding dead links on the web[0].

The inspiration for this project came from Wikipedia and the Internet Archive partnering to fix broken links on Wikipedia[1]. After briefly searching around I couldn't find any great tools for this, and I decided it would be an interesting side-project. I was also looking for a good medium-size project to improve my Go skills and understanding of concurrent programming.

From here I'd like to implement recursive searching functionality and depth limiting. I think this would greatly improve the appeal of the tool.

* [0] https://github.com/mschwager/riplink * [1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/26/internet-archive-broke...

I made a link tester for all the links on my webpage, after I did not maintain it for a while and half the links were dead: https://github.com/benibela/site/blob/master/manage.sh#L33

Like many people, I use Evernote as a personal Knowledgebase. I started this because I realized a lot of my bookmarks were rotting. But of course, links in my evernote notebooks face the same problem (as much as I try to capture the content).

Would it be possible to extend your tool to search Evernote, bookmarks, Confluence, and other link lists for rotten links?

It's definitely possible! I'd just have to teach RIPLink to ingest data from different sources. I.e. have it parse a text file (or other type of file) instead of HTML. Would you mind opening an issue on Github?

It would be neat if you could extract the desired data (text) from the page and hash it so that you could later fix the link (by pointing to a new valid link).

aim it at SEOs if you want to make money, broken link building is a pretty big strategy in the SEO world

Yup. An old but probably still used grey-hat strategy was to identify dead/forgotten websites with lots of 'seo juice' (had high rankings, google associates them with keywords strongly, etc). Then you buy that domain and host your new site on it, taking advantage of its history.

Interesting! I like the idea!

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