Dear ht://Check user,
if you read this, it means that at least you downloaded this extremely useful tool for Webmasters and, more in general, for Web site maintainers.
I hope you could start using this tool and get into it in a short time; and also you could use it on a daily basis, for the daily operations of Web sites administration, management and control of documents.
Just know that where I work, in Prato, Italy, we offer citizens, services regarding our government institution (city council) and, technically speaking, we have to manage more than 35 thousand HTML documents made by various Web publishers; but we have to control and to guarantee that the general system works and for instance there are no broken links between our documents.
And our documents reside on more than one Web server. I remember that the very very first version of ht://Check was started by me in 96, as my first big project made in C; it didn't use any HTTP call at all (I hardly knew what HTTP was after finishing high school!), just local calls. I called it htmlcheck.
I was so happy to see it working under Linux, with use of memory allocation structures such as lists, queues, binary trees and so on ... it could manage thousand documents, but only if they were on the same machine. You can imagine how sad I became when we started to move documents on several servers, or virtual hosts (it would not have been much of a problem to modify the code to handle them, as long as documents are all on the same host), and we began to use server-side techniques for dynamic publishing on the Web.
I had to rethink the whole thing. Fortunately I had recently started to use ht://Dig as our main search engine and started to help the development of the project as contributor. I found that there were many similar aspects in the two programs, especially as far as the spider part is concerned.
I asked Geoff if he would have minded to see me using part of the code of ht://Dig used in a new project, a link checker. I guess it was the beginning of 1999 and as the program derived from ht://Dig, I decided to call it ht://Check.
ht://Dig was GPLed, so I was so happy to be kinda forced to release ht://Check under GPL as well; and every day I am more and more convinced it was a great choice, because many people all over the world write me, because they found a bug. So you happily modify the code to fix it, and your application become more and more robust. That's a victory for everyone, I guess.
I also feel to thank everybody at my workplace who let me think, design, develop and maintain this wonderful project; the ht://Dig group, in particular Geoff, Gilles and Loic for their great support to me; ht://Check users and contributors of ideas, bug discoveries and ... whatever!
Now, the main shared part between these two project is the network library, which can now handle HTTP/1.1 with persistent connections and cookies support, and it's continously developed with the help of other contributors. Soon HTTPS will be made available too.
A quick note: the very first successful run of ht://Check was in April of 2000. Now, it is heavily used more than once a day in our working environment, managing more than 4 million records on 35 thousand documents retrieved (in 1 hour).
Finally, ht://Check is an opensource project and it comes for free. The only 'fee' I gently ask you to 'pay' is to spend 2 minutes of your precious time and fill the form in the 'Uses' page, providing the name of your organisation, the URL and the country you reside in. It is a means for letting me know how many people in the world find this utilitiy to be useful to them!
So please point your browser to http://htcheck.sourceforge.net/?a=uses !
Thank you.
Sincerely, Gabriele Bartolini