SiteOrbiter: Freeware Visual Reporting and Download Tool for Mac OS X
Downloaded 3/14/06. This looks like an amazing freebee, if the ratings on MacUpdate are true. You apparently get a visual site-mapper that’s also useful for link-checking. Gotta try it out.
Update 6/6/06. Yep, it’s a damn good tool, free or not. I’ve used countless link checking tools over the years, from the very expensive to the very cheap, and this holds its own with the best of them. Plus it does some things those did not, as a reflection of the developer’s “outside the box” thinking on the problem.
As a link checker, Site Orbiter hardly breaks a sweat. You set it loose on a website and–assuming it’s not blocked by robots.txt, which Site Orbiter politely obeys–it proceeds to compile the usual long catalog of links. I had it map this site, and despite all the JavaScript and such, Site Orbiter did an excellent job of finding the important stuff. Once it’s done, the software immediately writes out a neat HTML file to your default browser with the basic stats on your site, showing all of the files and links with basic info such as whether the link is new (since it’s last index) or modified, the status code (200, 404, etc), and even a list of the orphaned files.
But that’s just for starters. At this point, you have your site in Site Orbiter’s compact, 3-pane interface. At the top are a set of buttons that let you manipulate the graphical site map and make other adjustments. The top pane is your list of files in a sortable matrix, showing URL, Title, File Size, Number of Out Links, Number of In Links, Type of File, Return Code, Link Type (e.g., external, relative), and Last Modified Date. With this info, you can do a great deal to focus your attention on specific kinds of files or parts of the site.
The left-hand pane shows your visual site map, which at first looks more or less like a dab of abstract art. This map can be manipulated, though if it’s a large map, the response time will be pretty slow. The most effective thing, I found, was to either select a URL from the table above, or to select a node from the site map. The nodes are color-coded based on the Return Code. Broken links (code 404) are in red. Once you do this, you can eliminate the visual distraction by changing Site Orbiter’s display mode from “All Nodes” to “Selected Nodes”. At this point, you can easily see a map of just all the inbound and outbound links for your selected node. You can navigate to other nodes in this manner if you like.
The third pane is a basic summary report which doubles as a web browser. Whenever you click on a URL, that page or image loads into the third pane so you can see the page you’re analyzing. All of this functionality comes in a pretty stable form, too. Site Orbiter crashed on me once when I was playing with the visual map too much, but then never did so again.
As if this weren’t enough, you can also get a great deal of information from options in the menubar. At the top of the “Reports and Maps” menu is the “Missing and Moved Links” report, which generates an HTML report in your browser showing your broken links, organized for easy action in fixing the links. All the broken links appear to the left, each appearing in a group with all the files that refer to it. The next report, “Files by Directory” is also extremely useful. It has much of the information that appears in the sortable table, but organized by directory. Note that if you are using permalinks in Apache, as I am, Site Orbiter treats those directories as real ones for the purposes of this report.
Next comes your Site Map options. Yes… you can generate HTML site maps from Site Orbiter! You can choose single or double-column maps, with or without external links. If you choose external links, they all appear below the main map, in alphabetical order by page title. Site Orbiter also includes, for each link, the Description field from the external site. I tell you, this is one seriously useful tool!
Also in the Reports menu is an option to see the “Links To/From” whatever URL you have selected in the main interface, and you can regenerate both the original index report and the basic site stats report from here. There’s much more, but I’ve certainly said enough to satisfy myself that Site Orbiter deserves a spot in my “Site Management” toolbox! All the developer asks for in return for your use of Site Orbiter is to receive feedback about ways to make the software better. I don’t have much to suggest, but I certainly will send him some feedback!
P.S. I did forget one or two pretty important features! First, Site Orbiter lets you download whole websites using the same definitions you use for site maps. I didn’t test this feature, but this can be a pretty useful feature! The second is just to note that you can also use Site Orbiter to check links and make maps for websites set up on a local file system… again, covering a site management requirement that’s sure to arise from time to time.
