Check/Validate Bookmarks

Bookmark Buddy can check the status of bookmarks in the background to see if the web page has been updated since you last visited it, or if it has moved or disappeared.

To check all your bookmarks, select Check status of … Entire bookmark list from the Edit menu. To check an individual bookmark, or a category or subcategory of bookmarks, right-click on the title and select Check bookmark(s).

You will see a progress window indicating which bookmark is currently being checked. Click on the Pause button to temporarily stop bookmark checking; click on Resume to continue checking from where it stopped. Click Cancel to stop bookmark checking.

An alternative way to check a single bookmark is to right-click on the Site status box and from the popup menu select Check status now. This method does not open up the progress window.

Once checked, the site status is indicated in the box at the bottom-right corner of the main program window. Where known, the date of the last update to the bookmarked page is shown in the Notes window.

Once you have checked all your bookmarks you can filter them by site status using the final option on the Advanced Search window or sort them by site status in the List View window.

Bookmarks that have been checked within the past hour are not re-checked. Therefore if checking is interrupted for any reason, re-start checking within an hour and Bookmark Buddy will pick up from where checking was interrupted.

What the site status terms mean

Not checked: You have not yet asked Bookmark Buddy to check the bookmark, or you have reset the status.

Checking: Bookmark Buddy is in the process of checking the bookmark. This usually takes a second or two.

Updated: The bookmarked page has changed since you last visited it.

OK: The bookmarked page was found and either it has not changed since you last visited it or the server does not indicate when the page last changed.

Moved: The bookmarked page has moved to a new address.

Page not found: The bookmarked page no longer exists, but the domain name does.

Server not found: The domain name is unreachable, either because of a break in the Internet or because the web site no longer exists.

Server error: Server responded with an error message, which means that there is a problem with the server. However it does not always mean that the bookmarked page won’t load OK.

Not a valid URL: The bookmark address is not for a web site (beginning http:// or https://)

Unknown: The server did not respond (but the domain name exists) or its response contained nothing meaningful about the status of the bookmarked page.

Caveats

Many web pages are ‘dynamic’ (built on the fly) and so it is not possible to determine when the content was last updated. For such sites the bookmark status may always be ‘Updated’ or ‘OK’.

Many web servers do not return any meaningful information about the state of a URL; in which case the status is reported as ‘unknown’.

Unfortunately some web servers return an error message or an incorrect response when asked about the status of a bookmark. Therefore the site status should not be trusted 100%.

See also: