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 webmasters and 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 easily be used to check bookmark files.

Big Brother is distributed in source code, written in the Objective Caml language; it should compile "out of the box" on most Unix-based systems. Binaries for Windows 95/NT and RedHat Linux (i386) may also be available from the author's Web site. The whole program, including its source code, is placed in the public domain.

This version of Big Brother is a command-line tool. Putting a graphic interface--possibly written in a different programming language--on top of it should be reasonably easy. I no longer have time to do it, so if you're a programmer, think about it! Currently, the simplest way to use Big Brother is to sit down and write a one-line script (also known as batch file) to run Big Brother with appropriate options for your site. Once this is done, just run the script whenever you want to check your site.

In short, Big Brother...

• Verifies many links simultaneously, resulting in blazing speed.
• Supports remote (http) and local (file) links.
• Allows checking a site offline, through the use of mappings.
• Follows links recursively, allowing an entire site to be verified with a single command.
• Produces results either in a custom format (convenient for further processing by your own scripts), or directly as a human-readable HTML report.
• Supports the full HTML 4.0 language.
• Supports going through a proxy server.
• Allows controlling the frequency of network requests, to avoid overloading your server.
• Supports multiple password-protected realms.
• Has detailed documentation, available in HTML, PostScript and PDF formats.

Big Brother watches your documents and reports all mistakes--hence its name!

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François Pottier, January 16, 2005

What is Big Brother?

This web site is published by Informatikbüro Gerd Stolpmann