LinkScan 4.1: Huge Performance Boost & New Features

San Jose, CA, April 21, 1998 - Electronic Software Publishing Corporation (Elsop) has augmented the blazing speed of LinkScan's external link checking with new processes that greatly increase its speed validating internal links. CPU usage has been reduced by 30-50 percent and elapsed time to check a site has been cut nearly in half over earlier versions of LinkScan.

Elsop Introduces LinkScan/QuickCheck

The added convenience comes from a separate program supplied with LinkScan called QuickCheck. Following a full site scan, a user may decide to correct some errors in a few documents. QuickCheck enables the user to run a quick link validation on a single document (URL) to confirm that all of the errors were fixed and that no new errors were introduced in the revision process. LinkScan/QuickCheck may be run as a CGI script or from the command line.

More features enhance usability and functions of LinkScan

Elsop has also added the ability to validate FTP links and added syntax checking of mailto links. Another important new feature is the "All Pages Linking To ..." Report. This report helps webmasters quickly identify the impact of removing a document or file by listing all of the pages that link to it. Other new features in version 4.1 include support for server-side image maps, support for the HTTP Proxy-Authenticate feature and some new error conditions such as the additional status code "Location Header Not Absolute" and the status code "URL Contains Unsafe Character". The latter code indicates a link contains an 'unsafe' character; probably a control character or a non-encoded space (spaces in URL's should be written as "%20"). Numerous enhancements have also been made to the LinkScan Configurator and several minor bug fixes and improvements are in this release.

Added convenience for LinkScan/Dispatch

Numerous enhancements have also been added to LinkScan/Dispatch. These include additional configuration options and the ability to automatically email selective status reports to multiple recipients or document owners. The Dispatch facility enables senior management to monitor and manage the maintenance of documents and sites which are the responsibility of different webmasters from a central location.

LinkScan Users

LinkScan is being used by such large and diverse organizations as Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, the University of Cambridge (UK), the United States Department of Defense, the Vancouver Public Library (Canada), the California Institute of Technology, Australia's Commonwealth Department of the Environment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwest Airlines, Brown University, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, The MITRE Corporation, the Ford Motor Company, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Walgreens Pharmacy, the Boeing Company, Rueters, Business Week, and Molecular Simulations Inc.

Broken Links: The not so hidden site killers

Elsop's studies show that most websites have major problems. These include up to 30% of the external links being broken along with missing files and orphaned pages. Why? Because it's just too time consuming and difficult to quality assure a large website manually and other programs have been too slow and cumbersome to use.

The Solution to your Site Quality Problems: LinkScan

The solution is to use a powerful automatic link validator to test every link on your website. LinkScan is the answer. It is the most thorough and fastest quality assurance tool available for this task. LinkScan is essential to a professionally managed web site. It's also easy to use because it sets up all directories and permissions and builds your configuration file automatically. Most first time users have LinkScan installed and running in minutes.

Designed to work on both internet and intranet servers, LinkScan can test over 40,000 links per hour because it is the only link checker that uses multi-threaded simultaneous processing. Linkscan has successfully worked on websites with over 250,000 pages and more than 50,000 external links making it the pre-eminent tool for intranets.

SiteMap & TapMap: Whole new ways to navigate your website

LinkScan also produces two revolutionary types of maps of websites. LinkScan's SiteMap enables the user to produce a site map that includes every link on a website arranged in a hierarchical format that resembles a book's table of contents. LinkScan's TapMap is an expandable and collapsible site map that allows viewers to tap down through the various and multiple levels of a website to quickly and easily navigate and explore the website by tapping on a few control icons.

Solve your broken site problems today: Try LinkScan

The message to Webmasters is: Don't get caught with your links down. Don't let your visitors think your site sucks! You can now identify and fix those problems today. Free fully functional evaluation copies of LinkScan 4.1 may be downloaded (less than 240 Kbytes) from the company's website at:

http://www.elsop.com/linkscan/

Pricing, Upgrades, and Volume Discounts

LinkScan 4.1 is priced at 750 dollars per server. Version 4.1 is a free upgrade to purchasers of version 4.0. Upgrades from versions earlier than 4.0 may be purchased for 250 dollars. Volume discounts are available in single order quantities of five copies or more. Orders may be placed online via a secure server. Visa, MasterCard, and American Express cards are accepted in addition to payment by check or money order.