Categories
Other tools website

Find broken links on your website

I’ve been revamping the Felix manual, and I was worried about creating broken links in the process.

I was able to use a very cool tool called Xenu to find all the broken links on my site and quickly fix them. Xenu has a minimalistic interface, but it does what you need it to do, and very simply. First you feed it a URL or the path to a file on your computer. Xenu then spiders your site, and pops up a web page with all the broken links and the pages containing them. This is a great touch, because you can then jump right to the offending page and see where the broken link is.

The Google webmaster tools also give you a report on broken links, but it’s usually outdated (since they last spidered your site) and it doesn’t tell you where the broken links were. Xenu is thus a valuable addition to the webmaster’s toolkit.

Categories
marketing

Listing on Microsoft Office Marketplace

I’ve just got Felix listed on Microsoft Office Marketplace. If you’re a Felix user, I’d really appreciate it if you’d go over there and leave a rating.

It was actually fairly easy to get listed, and best of all, it was free! I simply created a landing page according to Microsoft specifications, and filled out their application form. One of the Office Marketplace people (Rashida Smith) contacted me right away, and I was approved and listed within a week. Thanks Rashida, you were very helpful.

I got the idea for applying from Bob Walsh’s Micro ISV – From Vision to Reality. I plan to post a complete review of this book later, but it contains a lot of great information for people starting a small software business.

Categories
website

Online wordcount tool now supports PDF files

I’ve added support for PDF files to my online wordcount tool. Now the tool can provide word counts for PDF files using the pyPdf library.

Addendum: I’ve replaced pyPdf with another pure-python library, pdfminer, which is much more robust at handling PDF files.

Categories
website

New online tool: Word count utility

Today I launched a new tool on the Felix website: an online word count utility. One of my goals for this site is to make it useful to translators, and word counts are one of the pain points for translators. This is especially true of those of us working into or out of (East) Asian languages, since most of the word-count tools out there don’t give Asian character counts (unlike those given by MS Word).

Basically, instead of luring people to this site, I want to make translators — my target customers — want to come here, and keep coming back, and tell their friends to come here, too.