linbot is a Python program that allows web masters to: view the structure of a site; track down broken links; find potentially outdated HTML pages; list links pointing to external sites; view portfolio of inline images; and do all this periodically and without user intervention. Results are displayed in a set of HTML pages.
Warning: I've found linbot to not be robust. It fails on fairly simple HTML pages. However, it is actively maintained so it should improve over time.
linbot is not called directly. Instead, I wrote a simple shell program
that sets/modifies the environment variable PYTHONPATH
to include the configuration file /etc/linbot/config.py. The
actual executable is placed in the /usr/lib/linbot/python
directory.
I included http://starship.skyport.net/crew/marduk/linbot/docs.html
and http://starship.skyport.net/crew/marduk/linbot/linbot.gif
and http://starship.skyport.net/crew/marduk/linbot/blackbar.gif
along with the main upstream source file http://starship.skyport.net/crew/marduk/linbot/download/linbot-1.0b9.tgz.
At the suggestion of Gregor
Hoffleit (the current Debian python package maintainer), I have
placed the python packages that come with linbot into the directory
/usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/linbot. This follows Gregor's
recommendation in /usr/doc/python/README.Debian.gz.
Here are list of tasks that I'm at least contemplating for linbot. They are roughly in order of when I plan to start them. My main guide is to increase robustness before adding new functionality. Feel free to email me if you have additional suggestions or would like to help.
I prefer to have all files associated with a package listed. The /usr/doc/python/README.maintainers
file shows how this can be done.
The Python
urllib.py package is documented as capable of using
proxy servers. However, I haven't been able to get this to work.
The current linbot man-page is out of date and is no longer supported by the upstream author.
There is currently little documentation on the configuration file and no man page.
marduk <marduk@starship.skyport.net> is the primary author. Oleg Broytmann <phd@comus.ru> contributed the man page. Jean Pierre LeJacq <jplejacq@quoininc.com> is the Debian package maintainer.
