Hi all! For those of you whose courses contain hyperlinks to external resources (ie., web pages that you don't control), is there a tool you can recommend (preferably free) that notifies you when a page URL has changed? I'm looking for the best way to make sure that the links in my course are always current, so I want to be notified when a page URL has changed so that I can update my course as needed.
Hello Matthew and Karl - thank you so much! Both solutions are so intriguing - I really appreciate you sharing them, and both ideas will be useful to me. However, I'm still stumped on the issue of notifications. I'd really like to be notified automatically, without me having to proactively check anything, whenever a link in my course needs to be updated. I started evaluating a tool called Visualping that seems to do this but there's a cost, so I'm still researching other solutions. Thanks again for taking the time to respond!
I think I'm going to take an approach similar to Karl's... I can make a list of my links in an XL file, and I have a friend who is willing to write a little script for me with Auto Hot Key, to automatically check the links every couple of days at a specific time. It shouldn't be too big of a pain because (I'm told) the script will run on its own as long as my computer is on. I'll probably set it to run at like 10am since I'm always working at that time.
I've just clicked on the link to your site to read through your tutorial on using hyperlinks but the site is set to private. Any chance you can share this content?
6 Replies
Hi Jeanette,
We use Rise as our development tool.
We added all the links in our Rise courses to an Excel file, and we use a macro to check the validity of each URL.
Hello Matthew and Karl - thank you so much! Both solutions are so intriguing - I really appreciate you sharing them, and both ideas will be useful to me. However, I'm still stumped on the issue of notifications. I'd really like to be notified automatically, without me having to proactively check anything, whenever a link in my course needs to be updated. I started evaluating a tool called Visualping that seems to do this but there's a cost, so I'm still researching other solutions. Thanks again for taking the time to respond!
I think I'm going to take an approach similar to Karl's... I can make a list of my links in an XL file, and I have a friend who is willing to write a little script for me with Auto Hot Key, to automatically check the links every couple of days at a specific time. It shouldn't be too big of a pain because (I'm told) the script will run on its own as long as my computer is on. I'll probably set it to run at like 10am since I'm always working at that time.
Just be aware that checking a list of URL's from Excel consumes a lot of computer resources, especially if you have a long list of links.
Hi Matthew,
I've just clicked on the link to your site to read through your tutorial on using hyperlinks but the site is set to private. Any chance you can share this content?
Thanks
Thanks Matthew that’s great. Sent from Mail for Windows 10