Linkok.com – modern broken link checker I've been working on for 3 years

by brunosutic • 2 years ago

5 6 2 years ago

brunosutic3• 2 years ago

Hi HN! I'm Bruno, the founder of https://linkok.com. linkok.com is a modern broken link checker.

I got the idea before the Covid pandemic: at the time I was looking for a better senior developer job. I sent a couple dozen job applications with my resume website, and I only got a couple job interviews, and no offers. I gave up and stayed at my old job. A couple months later I was optimizing my website. I checked for broken links and the results were bad: from 12 links total, 4 were broken. That's more than 30% broken links - no wonder I couldn't find a new job!

Since then I realized broken links are a problem for pretty much every website out there. If you have a website, you likely have broken links too. And the existing solutions don't cut it. Most online broken link checkers are old, and have outdated interface. Advanced SEO tools (ahrefs, semrush etc) can do broken links checking, but are too complex and expensive for regular people.

Under the hood linkok.com crawls sites using Async Ruby, which has proven great for this type of work. I love how easy it is to work with (when compared to threads). It also made some advanced features easy, like request retries. Async is a somewhat underused in the Ruby community. If someone has more questions about it, I'd be glad to answer.

My goal for linkok.com is that it should be easy to use (think: blogger moms), and it should be accurate and powerful enough for enterprises. linkok.com is free forever for small sites (up to 100 internal pages) and charges a fee for bigger sites. It's also completely free for open source, educational and non-profit websites. This is not automated yet, reach out at bruno.sutic@linkok.com and I'll set you up.

You may find this interesting: I worked on this project for 3 years! By far the hardest part was billing - integrating with Stripe properly took me almost 1 year (Stripe is very hard). I also shaved a couple of yaks, highlights: implemented postgresql and redis high availability, I run things bare metal servers (Hetzner).

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback and ideas! Looking forward to your comments.

pragmar3• 2 years ago

Congratulations on shipping, the site looks great. I've been working on a desktop app in the same space (website health/administration). It's been a similarly long journey. I've found marketing to be an uphill battle. It's a crowded marketplace, which in many ways indicates a healthy ecosystem, but difficult to crack nonetheless. Having a focused audience (e.g. bloggers) will help there. If you ever want to discuss marketing or talk shop, definitely reach out (ben at hn-username dot com)... maybe we could both learn something.

brunosutic3• 2 years ago

Quick question: how do you handle bot protection (eg Cloudflare) with your app?

Linkok.com – modern broken link checker I've been working on for 3 years

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