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The Linkchecker system is a custom system built to help automate the checking of URLs across a variety of VIN resources.

In general the system will check the URLs within a resource and produce a report that will help a person identify possible broken or incorrect URLs.

It was initially developed to be used on newsletters, but is now used as well for general VIN documents, as well as the VINcyclopedia, VVDH, Medical FAQs and Merck Veterinary Manual areas.

Some of the reports are generated ‘on-demand’, whilst others due to their size and complexity, are scheduled to run on set days at the weekend.

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Summary

• when creating mailings, often large numbers of links are included

• checking these links manually can be time-consuming and error-prone

• we created a tool to automate the checking of links, to provide an extra layer of robustness to sending out mailings

• usage of the tool will generate a Report that includes each link within the mailing, together with a ‘Status’ of the link, as well as a screenshot of the linked page, for eg:

  

How to use👇

1. send your draft email to [email protected]. It can be sent direct from the mailing service or another email address
2. you will receive an email back within ~10 minutes containing a link to your report
3. ensure that you have your VIN VPN installed & connected
4. click the link and you will be taken to the report

Limitations:

• the system was initially set up to process infrequent checking of email newsletters but as the scope has been extended to documents and the number of links within a document can apparently reach into the 100s, we are unsure of at what point it will stop functioning stably. We will start monitoring this
• we can currently process 4 reports of any kind simultaneously