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link activity check
Being new to Links and having looked around the forum I wondered if there is a plugin available that would automatically check the activity of a link with a cron job. Should an inactive link be found then the link owner automatically emailed from the system bringing this fact to their attention. The plugin should really have to ability to do staggered checks to lower server applications.

This I feel would be a good way of keeping in contact with users and maintain brand exposure.

Any ideas from you seasoned pro's would be good Smile.

Regards

AdeCrazy
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Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
Could you expand a bit more on 'inactive' ?

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] link activity check In reply to
By inactive I mean a 404 or timeout. This error message could be passed on to the link owner. It may be that the owner is doing routine maintenance on the site but it would always be good to keep them informed many people pay for hosting and web design only to find their site has gone down when showing off to clients.

Regards

Ade
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Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
You looked at my Error_Jump script? That will email you when a bad link has been found. It would be pretty easy to modify it to email the link owner instead...

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
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Re: [Andy] link activity check In reply to
Thanks for the advice Andy I will have a look. If you could post the mod code here then that would be great, I appreciate you work on a commercial level so should this be possible I'm sure it would be useful to many links owners....
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Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
Its not a free plugin I'm afraid. Details can be found here:

http://new.linkssql.net/...;page=Error_Jump_Pro

If you need the modifications done to it, I could do them for $15. Please send me a PM if you are interested.


Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
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Re: [Andy] link activity check In reply to
By the looks of things it would be good if it could be integrated into the following plugin this way you could have the activity check including a frame for advertising your site.

Regards

Ade



Askframes 1

Andy Newby
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Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
Yeah, the good thing about plugins, is that anything can be modified to work :) What you are suggesting is definatly possible.

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!
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Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
Sorry, forgot to say. All that would need doing, is changing the location that the frames.cgi script points to. e.g so it points to safe_jump.cgi, instead of jump.cgi.

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk
Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!
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Re: [Andy] link activity check In reply to
Thanks for the help Andy I may have a tinker around with some code. I'm fair to middle with C but when it comes to mySQL etc it's all a bit new to me.I'm currently studying C# & ASP.net

Regards

Ade
Quote Reply
Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
Hi,



did you have a look a t my VerifyMail-Plugin?

# ==============================================
# - VerifyMail - V. 1.0.0
# © by Manuel Kester 2002
# ==============================================
This plugin allows you to send emails with an alert-message to link-owners,
based on the results of nph-verify.cgi
Price: $25 for a single license

The plugin will handle the following nph-verify-error-codes :
  • -6 : Could not resolve host name
  • -4 : Could Not Connect
  • 204 : No Response
  • 400 : Bad Request
  • 401 : Unauthorized
  • 403 : Forbidden
  • 404 : File Not Found
  • 503 : Gateway Timeout

    And this are your options:
  • option to setup own FROM-email-address
  • option to setup own email-subject
  • option to design own alert-email-body (stored in default template-set) with the following tags availible (<%ID%>,<%Title%>,<%URL%>,<%error_msg%>)
  • option to select the displayed error-links of nph-verify.cgi per day (just today's error-results, the error-result of today and yesterday...and so on)
  • option to send error-message to all displayed error-links at once or to each manually
  • direct-links to delete or modify each link
  • option to provide a select-option to the link-owner (via form.txt-template) to choose if he/she wants to recieve alert-messages in case of nph-verify.cgi detects an error




  • Unfortunatly the plugin itself doesn't run via cron but you can setup nph-verify.pl to run by cron (e.g. check links every 7 days) so that you just have to click the plugin-link "send alert-eMail to all" once a day.



    Regards,
    Manu

    Shopping Portal Shop-Netz.de® | Partnerprogramme | Flugreisen & Billigflüge | KESTERMEDIA e.K. | European Affiliate Marketing Forum.
    Quote Reply
    Re: [ManuGermany] link activity check In reply to
    I do run Andys error jump plug-in. It is brilliant and saves a lot of donkey work on the site. As Andy points out, it sends the admin an email stating what the problem is, and, the link number then and refers the unlucky user to an error page. It simply is a script that saves the need to have users refer a bad link to admin, which most possibly will not. And Andy - the ability to send an email to the site owner as well would make your script brilliant.

    I have not seen the script from our German friend - however there would be most definitely a call for this script if you have a database of valid owners of links. I sadly, do not have that - mine are imported from dmoz recently. The value of this one is obvious to me.The offshoot as I see it is every plug-in that does the administration for you is worth its weight in gold.

    Hope this helps some in decision making

    Paul
    Quote Reply
    Re: [Gypsypup] link activity check In reply to
    In Reply To:
    I do run Andys error jump plug-in. It is brilliant and saves a lot of donkey work on the site. As Andy points out, it sends the admin an email stating what the problem is, and, the link number then and refers the unlucky user to an error page. It simply is a script that saves the need to have users refer a bad link to admin, which most possibly will not.

    Paul




    Hi Paul,

    thanks for your comments!

    1.) VerifyMail doesn't need a user, who reports a bad link because the plugin grabbs the results from nph-verify.pl (Admin->Database->Verify Links/Link Status) which you can run manually or by cron

    2.) It sends out an eMail to the LinkOwner(Contact_Email) with the LinkID, Link-Title and the Error-Code/-Description (this eMail is template-driven so you can customize it to your needs)

    At the current version the eMails are not send by cron but you have the choice to send the eMails to all error-links/-pages at once (link in Plugin admin "Send alert-message to all") or one by one manually.

    For my uses I've set up nph-verify.pl as a cron job to check every link in my database every seven days at night. The only thing I have to do manually is to click on the link "send alert-message to all" once a day if there are error-links in the list.

    Regards,
    Manu

    Shopping Portal Shop-Netz.de® | Partnerprogramme | Flugreisen & Billigflüge | KESTERMEDIA e.K. | European Affiliate Marketing Forum.

    Last edited by:

    ManuGermany: Sep 18, 2003, 1:02 AM
    Quote Reply
    Re: [ManuGermany] link activity check In reply to
    So are we saying that Andys plugin uses the nph-verify.pl?. The only problem that I can see with validating links is that should a person have spelled their URL incorrectly and it slips through the admin net, a user could end up getting false emails as their site is fine but links is firing blanks. Should this is not true then please let me know, in no way am I putting these activity plugins down as I would gladly love a plugin that could do such a thing (at the right price of course). If Manu could send me his URL for the plugin it would be great I would like to have a little look. As for cron jobs exactly how does one set up a cron job to run the nph-verify.pl script as Manu has? This seems like an ingenious solution. As I have mentioned in the previous posts, a plugin that could tell the user that their site was down could be an asset to a your site enforcing a brand in a considerate way.

    Regards

    Adrian

    Last edited by:

    ade f: Sep 18, 2003, 5:31 AM
    Quote Reply
    Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
    >>>So are we saying that Andys plugin uses the nph-verify.pl?.<<<

    Nope. My plugin uses HTTP::Request.. which checks the status of the URL. Doesn't have any reference to nph-verify.pl (or .cgi) Tongue

    Cheers

    Andy (mod)
    andy@ultranerds.co.uk
    Want to give me something back for my help? Please see my Amazon Wish List
    GLinks ULTRA Package | GLinks ULTRA Package PRO
    Links SQL Plugins | Website Design and SEO | UltraNerds | ULTRAGLobals Plugin | Pre-Made Template Sets | FREE GLinks Plugins!
    Quote Reply
    Re: [ade f] link activity check In reply to
    In Reply To:
    So are we saying that Andys plugin uses the nph-verify.pl?. The only problem that I can see with validating links is that should a person have spelled their URL incorrectly and it slips through the admin net, a user could end up getting false emails as their site is fine but links is firing blanks. Should this is not true then please let me know, in no way am I putting these activity plugins down as I would gladly love a plugin that could do such a thing (at the right price of course). If Manu could send me his URL for the plugin it would be great I would like to have a little look. As for cron jobs exactly how does one set up a cron job to run the nph-verify.pl script as Manu has? This seems like an ingenious solution. As I have mentioned in the previous posts, a plugin that could tell the user that their site was down could be an asset to a your site enforcing a brand in a considerate way.

    Regards

    Adrian


    No, my plugin uses the nph-verify.pl!

    If a website is fine but the url was incorrect at the submission, the link-owner gets an error-message, thats true. But the message is template-driven and you have also the tag <%URL%> for use so the reciever of an error-message could quickly see that this was in reason of a wrong url and that he should modify his link.



    nph-verify.pl as cron (from my VerifyMail-Plugin [About]):




    Using nph-verify.cgi
    You have to possibilities running nph-verify.cgi.
    First is to run it manually (Admin->Database->Verify Links)
    Second is to set it up as a cron-job (as I did):
    Examples:
    /path/to/cgi-bin/admin/nph-verify.cgi --check_from 7
    this will check every link that has not been checked for seven days

    other nph-verify.cgi - options:
    --check_problem
    --check_new
    --check_status status_code
    --check_all

    best time to run nph-verify.cgi via cron is at night, when there is low traffic at your server.




    Regards,
    Manu

    Shopping Portal Shop-Netz.de® | Partnerprogramme | Flugreisen & Billigflüge | KESTERMEDIA e.K. | European Affiliate Marketing Forum.