What is Big Brother?

What is Big Brother?

Big Brother allows you to keep an eye on your World Wide Web links. It is essential for HTML authors who wish to make sure that the links contained in their pages are up-to-date, a chore which quickly gets out of hand without an automated tool! It is also invaluable to those who maintain a large list of bookmarks, since it can cooperate with URL Manager Pro.

Big Brother checks remote and local links. Whenever it detects that a remote link actually points to a local file, the link is checked directly, thus saving a connection. It can be set to check local links only, so you can verify the internal structure of your site without firing up your modem.

Big Brother works with files stored on your hard disk, but it can also fetch files from a remote Web server. It is able to follow links recursively, allowing you to check an entire site with a single command.

Results are displayed on screen for browsing. Each link can easily be opened using your preferred browser or displayed using a text editor. It is possible to save the results as an HTML file. Finally, Big Brother is scriptable, which lets you easily automate checks.

Big Brother knows about all HTML 3.2 tags, including...

 

What Big Brother is not

When a document becomes unavailable, its author can either remove it altogether or replace it with a page containing a short explanatory message. Similarly, when a document moves, the author has a choice between configuring the Web server to provide clients with the new address (at a low level), or replacing the document with a page containing a link to the new location. In the first case, Big Brother can identify that the document is missing or has moved and alert you about it. In the second case, there is no way for Big Brother to distinguish the explanatory message from the expected document, so the error will remain undetected.

Besides, Big Brother is not an HTML syntax checker. Its job is to verify links, and errors in your HTML documents will go entirely unnoticed.

Finally, Big Brother currently ignores FTP links. This limitation might be removed in a future version.

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One of the toughest things to do as a Webmaster is to make certain that all your links are good. That’s not a problem when you’re dealing with only a page or two, but when your site climbs above 50 or so pages, well, that’s a different matter. Big Brother watches over your links (not you, 0 paranoid one), and makes sure that links to other pages on your site and also links to external pages are good. The program displays the results of the link check onscreen, and you can open each link to check it with your preferred browser. You can save the results as an HTML file, and Big Brother is scriptable.

Echler, Nikki, Reynolds, David, & Turner, Daniel Drew. (October 1997). The Top 50 Shareware Programs. MacAddict. (pgs. 38-39).

Download Big Brother for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K + PPC (FAT)

At least 2.1MB of free RAM

Mac OS 7.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II