Checking your blog for broken links with Xenu's Link Sleuth

As your blog fills up with posts, there is a high probability that the external off-blog links you refer to might become outdated overtime. Also, if you use third-party services to store your images, software, or other reference files, might become broken. Therefore, it is a good idea once awhile to perform blog maintenance and restore the links functionality. However, checking manually one-by-one might be a tiresome and time-consuming procedure. Today, we would like to present a free portable utility, which is going to help you performing the task.

Xenu's Link Sleuth checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
• Partial testing of ftp, gopher and mail URLs
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

System requirements:

Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7, WININET.DLL required (included with Internet Explorer).

How to make utility portable (optional):

Download the ZIP package and extract. Extract the installer to a folder of your choice with Universal Extractor. Delete $PLUGINSDIR folder. Launch Xenu.exe.

Developers’ website: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Direct Download Link (latest release 1.3.8): http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP

Spice your Blog with relevant content with Zemanta Plug-in

In the strong competition among bloggers for the reader’s attention, you can spice your blog and make it more fun to read, adding the most relevant and fresh information with free plug-in, offered by Zemanta (http://www.zemanta.com/). Currently available only in Firefox and Internet Explorer, Zemanta’s adds-on provides bloggers with appropriate links to their articles by suggesting related content through words and images on the side.

One of the great things about Zemanta is that it actually scans the web for Creative Commons content, so bloggers will be able to post useful images without the fear of being sued by an angry author.

As stated by the developers, Zemanta can add

• Fun: it is fun to see your words paired with great links and pictures.
• Content: Pictures, Links, Articles and Tags
• Convenience: no more trolling the web for content for your posts.
• Traffic: links to recent blog posts frequently result in return traffic.

The software is currently available for Blogger, Typepad, WordPress.com, and self-hosted WordPress blogs (2.0 and up).

Download free plug-in directly: for Internet Explorer browser.
Plug-ins for Firefox and other platforms can be downloaded from the developers Website.