Comments on: Repairing Your Site with Xenu Link Sleuth

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:41:01 +0000

Broken links was a real pain for me. Thanks for the tip!

By: Adolfo

Adolfo — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:30:09 +0000

I too am unable to find any preference to check sites that require login/authentication.

I see some reference in the documentation about setting up a proxy or something. Does anyone have any experience checking sites that require authentication with this application?

By: alec

alec — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:55:40 +0000

Hello Ahmed,

You are welcome.

I assure you that the feature is in Xenu but we don’t use it ourselves. You’ll have to experiment (try logging in to a site and then running Xenu on it). I believe this functionality is documented on the Xenu site.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:39:23 +0000

I am unable to find the option you mentioned for Authenticated session. I m using Xenu 1.3 didn’t find this option in Preferences?

By: alec

alec — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:21:44 +0000

Generally, yes, it is possible to check authenticated pages with Xenu Link Sleuth. You have to already be logged in to the site in question in Internet Explorer and then tick one of the preferences to check authenticated pages.

Be very careful about using the authenticated page checker. Developers often leave all kinds of delete buttons in their authenticated pages as they know spiders won’t be running through them (although in this case, Xenu would).

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:27:41 +0000

Thanks for your reply. Can you please also remove my one ambiguity. I tried Xenu for testing web sites where login is required, it seems to be skipping those pages which require authentication by providing user login and password and pulls up rest of all pages of the websites. Is there a way Xenu can be used to check all the signed in pages?

Thanks

By: alec

alec — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:07:37 +0000

Hello Ahmed,

Glad Xenu helped you too! Xenu is one of the greatest tools ever built in the area of web development.

Your problem is the javascript. Xenu is not equipped and will not be equipped to handle javascript (I’ve corresponded with Tilman Hausherr and while he is very nice, he is very clear about the focus of Xenu).

FYI, here is the future feature list for Xenu Link Sleuth. The only item on that list likely to happen would be robots.txt support.

In any case, Google for the most part can’t read javascript menus either. So you need to add replacement menus in the footer or use a more sophisticated kind of mixed javacript/html menu. Basically, if you want to make your life easier and get some rankings in Google, drop the javascript.

All the best.

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 09:28:52 +0000

I just finished exploring XENU 1.3 and found it really helpful in testing web applications. We also tried Xenu for Site menus (such as drop downs, site navigation menus etc) but were unable to get any result. Can you please confirm if we could infact use it for site navigation menu testing as well?(without manually clicking on each menu sub level individually). The site menus are written in JavaScript while each sub level menu points to some live urls (which are obviously hard coded) I wanted to inquire is there a way or any Xenu feature , through which Fiddler can check all urls/link specified in Menu drop down without manually clicking them.

By: alec

alec — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 09:10:18 +0000

Hello Warren,

We use static links. What I mean by dynamic is database driven. Of course a database driven site can be run locally. But it’s a significant amount of extra overhead setting the site up and troubleshooting it in two different server environments (your webhost and your local Apache configuration, assuming LAMP).

So it’s easier to run Xenu against the live server. But make sure to set the simultaneous connections lower than five if you don’t want to either slow down your server or get Xenu banned by security mechanisms.

By: warren

warren — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 08:17:41 +0000

Isn’t remote vs local an almost entirely different issue than static vs dynamic.
For a dynamic site the main problem tends to be the lack of hard coded href links, much of the site only is accessed via click events and the like.

Even if you run Xenu on the live server it won’t work it’s way past the opening page if there aren’t any static links to follow.