Netvouz blog

New release 2006-01-22 - Link Validator (and some other enhancements)

• This release brings the Netvouz Link Validator back in business again (it has been offline for quite a while now). This means that from now on all your links will be verified once a week to see if they are working.
  
  If the Link Validator discovers that a link is not working, it is marked as "possibly broken". If it is still not working on the next run (one week later) it is marked as "broken". If you have broken links (seriously broken, not just possibly broken) you get a message about that when you log on to your bookmarks page (or when you have submitted a link thru the Add2Netvouz button) and you can then go to the broken links administrator (only visible if you have broken links).
  
  The broken links administrator gives you basically three options for each broken link; delete it (if you know it's broken), mark it as valid (if the link validator incorrectly has reported the link broken), or mark it as intranet (links on an intranet are not accessible by the link validator and are therefore reported broken, by marking them as intranet you excluded them from future link validations). If you are not sure if a link is really broken or not (the Link Validator may, in some situations, actually report working links as broken) you can click the New window to open the link and see if it works.
  
  Just so you know, I expect a massive number of support mails in two weeks time when lots of users are thrown into the broken links administrator for the first time... Puh ;-)
  
  
• This release also merges the two cookies Netvouz has used to keep you logged on into a single cookie. The new cookie does not store your password in the cookie itself (the older did, albeit in encrypted form), but rather a so called challenge string calculated using an algorithm based on some information in your account. This also increases your security, as not even a single bit of your password is stored on your computer. The only drawback is that because the old cookie is not used anymore you will have to log on once again.
  
  
• When you have submitted bookmarks using the Add2Netvouz button, the last "success" page has been removed so there's one less click you need to make. If you have broken links, however, the page is still displayed and gives you an option to process your broken links.
  
  
• When submitting a bookmark using the Add2Netvouz button and you have not entered any description or tags, a popup window asks if you really want to save the bookmark without that information. Some people may find this a bit annoying but it's really there to make the bookmarks on Netvouz more informative and easier to find, both for yourself and for others. So please, take a few seconds and enter a description and some good tags. The description can even be copied automatically from the page you are submitting and tags are retrieved from the description, so there's really no excuse not to do it...
  
  
• Added some feeds that will be used for some cool stuff by the upcoming Netvouz plugin for Firefox.
  

Next up is some improvements to the Import bookmarks feature.


Update 2006-02-02 - Link Validator suspended
Because of some stability problems the link validator is temporarily suspended. The problems have already been fixed, but in order to be 100% sure the link validator will be offline for a few more days.

//Henrik