Friday 19 July 2019

Migrating to a secure (https://) website using Scrutiny 9

There is a more recent and updated version of this article here.

Yesterday I moved another website to https:// and thought I'd take the opportunity to make an updated version of this article. Scrutiny 9 has just been launched.

Google have long been pushing the move to https. Browsers now display an "insecure" message if your site isn't https://

Once the certificate is installed (which I won't go into) then you must weed out links to your http:// pages and pages that have 'mixed' or 'insecure' content, ie references to images, css, js and other files which are http://.

Scrutiny makes it easy to find these.

1. Find links to http pages and pages with insecure content.

First you have to make sure that you're giving your https:// address as your starting url, and make sure that these two boxes are ticked in your settings,

and these boxes ticked in your Preferences,

After running a scan, Scrutiny will offer to show you these issues. If you started at an https:// url, and you had the above boxes checked, then you'll automatically see this box (if there are any issues).
You'll have to fix-and-rescan until there's nothing reported. (When you make certain fixes, that may reveal new pages to Scrutiny for testing).

2. Fix broken links and images

Once those are fixed, there may be some broken links and broken images to fix too (I was copying stuff onto a new server and chose to only copy what was needed. There are inevitably things that you miss...) Scrutiny will report these and make them easy to find.

3. Submit to Google.

Scrutiny can also generate the xml sitemap for you, listing your new pages (and images and pdf files too if you want).

Apparently Google treats the https:// version of your site as a separate 'property' in its Search Console (was Google Webmaster Tools). So you'll have to add the https:// site as a new property and upload the new sitemap.

[update 15 Jul] I uploaded my sitemap on Jul 13, it was processed on Jul 14.

4. Redirect

As part of the migration process, Google recommends that you then "Redirect your users and search engines to the HTTPS page or resource with server-side 301 HTTP redirects"  (full article here)





Sunday 7 July 2019

Press Release - Integrity Pro v9 released

Integrity Pro version 9 is now fully released. It is a free update for existing licence holders.

The major new features are as follows:
  • Improved Link and Page inspectors. New tabs on the link inspector show all of a url's redirects and any warnings that were logged during the scan.

  • Warnings. A variety of things may now be logged during the scan. For example, a redirect chain or certain problems discovered with the html. If there are any such issues, they'll be highlighted in orange in the links views, and the details will be listed on the new Warnings tab of the Link Inspector.
  • Rechecking. This is an important part of your workflow. Check, fix, re-check. You may have 'fixed' a link by removing it from a page, or by editing the target url. In these cases, simply re-checking the url that Integrity reported as bad will not help. It's necessary to re-check the page that the link appeared on. Now you can ask Integrity to recheck a url, or the page that the url appeared on. And in either case, you can select multiple items before choosing the re-check command.
  • Internal changes. There are some important changes to the internal flow which will eliminate certain false positives.


More general information about Integrity Pro is here:
https://peacockmedia.software/mac/integrity-pro/

Friday 5 July 2019

Two Mac bundles: Web Maestro Bundle and Web Virtuoso Bundle

I recently answered a question about the overlap with some of our apps. The customer wanted to know which apps he needed in order to possess all of the functionality.

For example, Website Watchman goes much further with its archiving functionality than Integrity and Scrutiny. But Webscraper entirely contains the crawling and markdown conversion of HTML2MD

The answer was that he'd need three apps. It was clear that there should be a bundle option. So here it is.

There are two bundles, one containing Integrity Pro, which crawls a website checking for  broken links, SEO issues, spelling and generates XML sitemap.  The alternative bundle contains Scrutiny which has many advanced features over Integrity Pro, such as scheduling, js rendering.

These are the bundles.

Web Maestro Bundle:

Scrutiny: Link check, SEO checks, Spelling, Searching, Advanced features
Website Watchman: Monitor, Archive. Time Machine for your website
Webscraper: Extract and Convert data or entrire content. Extract content as html, markdown or plain text. Extract data from spans, divs etc using classes or ids. Or apply a Regex to the pages.


Web Virtuoso Bundle:

Integrity Pro: Link check, SEO checks, Spelling
Website Watchman: Monitor, Archive. Time Machine for your website
Webscraper: Extract and Convert data or entrire content. Extract content as html, markdown or plain text. Extract data from spans, divs etc using classes or ids. Or apply a Regex to the pages.


The link for accessing these bundles is:
https://peacockmedia.software/#bundles

If you're interested in an affiliate scheme which allows you to promote and earn from these bundles and the separate products, this is the sign-up form:
https://a.paddle.com/join/program/198