I was chatting with a friend earlier today and we were discussing extracting data from a web pages, specifically with regards to links and their anchors which got me thinking on how we can improve the links report here on URL Checker.

When I got back I got straight into looking at our reporting functions, how they work, what they collect and how they could possibly be improved. After a couple of false starts, lots coffee and even more testing we have a new and improved links report.

Now the links section will show you the link (obviously!) and the anchors, but what if the anchor is an image? Well initially this was over looked and ended causing blank spaces where there should have been anchor information!

Another large caffeine injection and I managed to refine the code to pull the src value as well, so now those empty boxes are not empty anymore. The new improved link section of the URL Checker report will now show link and anchor, if the anchor was actually an image it will now show you the path to that image.


There are still some more improvements we would like to make to the links report, one idea is to create a completely separate report just for links. This would allow us to go much more in-depth into that side of things but for now we've just updated the main report and still deciding what the best way forward would be with regards to the link report.


As usual any problems, suggestions or if you just want to say hi drop me a line

Admin