Show HN: Weakest Link Reporter

This is my first post, and the first project I will be posting to a community... so be nice please. Also, I am not really interested in any other projects that do the exact same thing… I often like to reinvent the wheel, just for the experience.

I work as a front-end web developer, and whenever I am about to push a site live, there is usually a huge list of bugs and general issues to fix, before a website can be seen by the public. The lists of bugs, are generally created by non-programmers, which means they really only care about the content of the site (ie grammar, spelling etc)… If I can fix all of the programming related errors before they get a chance to make these UAT lists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_acceptance_testing#User_acceptance_testing), it makes my life and their lives easier. One of the most common problems are bad links, as I hardly ever click each link that I create. I created this tool to test all links found in every html file, found in a target directory, recursively; and generate a report on the results. If the script finds an internal/relative link, it checks to see if the file exists; if the link is external, it does an http request.

I wrote this script in perl and made it work like a unix command line tool; I eventually want to make it a real command line tool, but I don’t know how yet. Also, my co-workers who are not unix friendly, suggested that I make a web form interface to activate the script. There are many things I can do to make this tool more useful; this version met a specific set of criteria for a project. Now that the project is over, I plan to expand this tool for more general use.

Let me know what you think, if you would use a tool like this, and if you want to help dev it.

Project: https://github.com/mathew-fleisch/Weakest-Link

Script: https://github.com/mathew-fleisch/Weakest-Link/blob/master/weakest_link.v1.0.pl

Sample Report: https://github.com/mathew-fleisch/Weakest-Link/blob/master/bh-eu-12-link-report.xls