Link Evaluator
Link Evaluator is a Firefox extension designed to help users evaluate the availability of online resources linked to from a given Web page. When started, it automatically follows all links on the current page, and assesses the responses of each URL (link). Link Evaluator examines both the HTTP status code and the page contents returned by each URL, and attempts to distinguish between various results such as: broken links (404) network time-outs authentication failure, and "incorrect" content for the given URL. After each link is checked, it is highlighted with a color based on the relative success of the result: green for fully successful, shades of yellow for partly successful, and red for unsuccessful. Link Evaluator is capable of detecting "red-flag" and "green-flag" phrases embedded in Web content specifically for checking links, i.e. text that is likely to indicate a Web page has been successfully reached or not. You can also edit the sets of red- and green-flag phrases to be used. You can also create special "Link Evaluator-aware" test pages in which the test phrases for each resource are embedded right in the HTML. For example, a library could create a page of test links for its particular set of electronic resources, and then add test phrases to the page, so that all the library's resources can be accurately evaluated at any later point, by simply running Link Evaluator on this test page.
