Do you frequently bookmark fun and interesting websites? Have you amassed a collection of links that were useful at one time but have since forgotten what most of them were for? We’ll I’ve got you covered in this week’s FreewareFrenzy. I’ll be examining AM DeadLink v2.8.
Setup is standard fair; a license agreement, installation folder, start menu folder (with turn off option), and desktop icon option. I was ready to go in seconds.
When you first open AMDL you’ll see a long list of all of your favorites from your internet browser. AMDL supports IE, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera. Simply select your browser from the drop down menu in the upper left if you need to organize the favorites from a different browser. You can also work on a text file, if perhaps a friend or colleague sent you a list of favorites. All of my favorites are from Avant Browser (which is IE-based) so I’ll be working with them.
AMDL lists your favorites with a few columns; Name, URL, Error, Status, Absolute Path and Folder. Absolute Path is the folder tree to find a URL in your favorites list; if nothing is showing, the URL is merely under Favorites and not further organized. The Folder gives the last part of the path where the specific URL is listed.
The main feature of AMDL is to check your favorites. AMDL will go through the list of favorites and report back which ones are ok, which have become “deadlinks”, and which have since become redirects. Hence the Error and Status columns I mentioned earlier. You can also check for duplicates in a large collection. My 50 or so favorites were checked in under a minute but depending on your internet connection speed, and how many favorites you have, it could be a lengthy process. The majority of my links came back OK, but I had a few listed as “Redirected OK”. This means that the link is not direct; the page has been moved to a new address, but the resulting page is the one I wanted. One of my favorites came back with a 404 error which we all know to be “Page not Found”. To check, I double clicked the link and sure enough the internal browser came back with “Page Could Not Be Displayed.” While it is unfortunate the link is dead, it was a page diagramming various pin layouts for electrical connections, I know now, and I can remove it using the recycling bin button and search for a replacement. For lists with a handful of errors, use the button at the top with two upward arrows. This will sort the problem sites to the top of the list so you can work on them easily, without scrolling around a long list.
One final option is the apple button. This will not only check the bookmarks, but it will download favicons. These are the little icons that show up next to favorites and URLs in the address bar in your browser. Ours here are PCMech is a blue square with a “PC”. They are useful visual reminders of which website the link originated from.
Some additional features include Internal Preview (you can also launch your external browser). If the name and URL can’t jog your memory about a particular link, a built in page viewer will load the page. This is also helpful for renaming links that were added hastily. The built in search helps you locate a particular link in a large collection. I personally keep my favorites tidy, but frequent net surfers, blog lovers and IT professionals will surely have amassed a collection of hundreds of links through years of surfing and book marking. Via the Show Logfile option, you can even check the source code a webpage that maybe you bookmarked as a web designer. You can also save each browsers list of favorites in a backup zip file to restore after a crash and reformat, to travel with or share with others.
There are various settings including language options, connection settings (HTTP or FTP proxies), locations of either bookmarks in alternative browsers or backup directories, and timeouts for URL checking. The help file is basic, covering only a few options, but I found that AMDL is simple enough that minimal help is necessary.
Check out AM DeadLink here: http://www.aignes.com/deadlink.htm
