Performing a content audit using Scrutiny

I've just seen this post by Sean at SEO Hacker about conducting a content audit.

There's lots of useful advice - checking for keywords in page titles, length of meta description,  length of page title, thin content, grammar check, broken links, avoiding keyword stuffing, images with no alt text.

Sean's article expands on all of these things and is well worth a read.

But he begins by making a spreadsheet listing all of your pages and copy-and-pasting each page title and other information manually.

Scrutiny can do this for you, furthermore, at the touch of a button it can show you pages that may need attention with regard to many of the problems above. (It has a free unrestricted 30-day trial.)

Here's the 'getting started' video once more, which focuses mainly on making a scan but does visit the SEO results from where you can use the filter button and keyword search box to perform the checks above. Or if you like you can export to CSV and open in a spreadsheet to do more of a visual check as Sean suggests, saving you the copying and pasting.

html validation with Scrutiny

Problem: Because of some changes with the w3c validator, Scrutiny is no longer receiving the expected response back from the public instance of the validator.

At present, it seems a little random which w3c server will deal with your request and therefore whether Scrutiny shows results. If you have this problem then the validation results will have empty warnings and errors columns:

Workaround: The Validator S.A.C. application is free to use, and installs a version of the w3c validator locally for you. It seems that the app contains a version of the validator that is compatible with Scrutiny. With a little setting up, Scrutiny can use this local instance of the validator and will show results once more.

This has always been better than using the public instance because there are no limits (the public instance had a limit of 100 pages in one batch) and you can go to Preferences > Validation and set your delay to zero, with impunity, thus validating all of your pages much faster:

The Validator S.A.C application can be found here:

http://habilis.net/validator-sac/

After downloading and running, follow the instructions below 'Advanced Topics' on that page.

To switch Scrutiny over to use your local instance of the validator, go to Preferences > Validation and click the text 'http://localhost/w3c-validator' and the address will be pasted into the location box.

(NB after making that switch, it may be necessary to quit and re-start Scrutiny)

Wow, it's amazing when stuff like this happens. I don't know who bowlerboy is and this certainly wasn't solicited or engineered in any way. From MacUpdate's Scrutiny page.

The Integrity v6 engine - a website crawling / spidering engine for developers

A major change for Scrutiny v6 will be 'under the hood' (or bonnet as we say here in the UK). It'll separate the engine from higher functionality and the UI.

This will mean that I can make it available to other developers to use in their own tools.

More hundreds of hours than I care to calculate have gone into developing the code which scans a website accurately and fully. It works well and I'm proud of that - parsing arbitrary (and sometimes non-compliant) html code is full of pitfalls.

For Scrutiny users, v6 will be a step forward, and may not be a paid upgrade. It will incorporate tools such as the .dot visualiser and the text-only engine (currently both available as SiteViz and Robotize)

For developers, I'd love to make the engine available. I feel that my strengths lie in building and maintaining that engine, more so than building a UI or producing and marketing a consumer product.

Work is underway. I'm not sure whether it'll be a cocoa framework (with friendly API), a CLI tool (which of course can be used in a Mac app) or both.

It won't be open source. I want to provide a free version and license a faster, paid-for version.

If you're interested then please let me know, it's shiela[at]peacockmedia.software. Work is now underway and it would be really useful to have an indication of interest and thoughts on how best to make the engine available.

[Update]  The engine is now available in a demo xcode project which should give you the info you need to use it.

http://peacockmedia.software/mac/integrity/framework.html

403 'forbidden' server response when crawling website using Scrutiny

The problem: Scrutiny fails to retrieve the first page of your website and therefore gets no further. The result looks like this (above).

The reason: By default Scrutiny uses its own user-agent string (thus being honest with servers about its identity). This particular website (and the first I've seen for a long time to do this) is refusing to serve the website without the request being made from a recognised browser.

The solution: Scrutiny > Preferences > General

The first box on the first Preferences tab is 'User agent string'. A button beside this box allows you to choose from a selection of browsers (this is called 'spoofing'). If you'd like Scrutiny to identify itself as a browser or a version not in the list, just find the appropriate string and paste it in (if you can run your chosen browser, you can use this tool to find the UA string)

With the User agent string changed to that of a recognised browser, this problem may be solved.

Getting started with Scrutiny - first video

A milestone! I can't tell you how please I am with our first instructional video.

It's a quick tour of Scrutiny for Mac, performing a basic link check, reading the results, discussing a few settings and some troubleshooting. Much of this will be relevant to Integrity and Integrity Plus.




... top marks to tacomusic who has just become the voice of PeacockMedia!

Apple Music not playing nicely

[update 16/8/15] This issue now seems to be resolved in iTunes 12.2.2.25

21 Jul 2015

Screensleeves, the album art screensaver for Mac, is currently having trouble displaying the artwork and track details when the new streaming service (Apple Music) is being used.

Applescript (the sensible way for applications to talk to each other) is often overlooked - there are ongoing problems with Spotify, although it's been possible to work around most of these. But it's particularly disappointing when Apple themselves neglect their own scripting interface.

iTunes' 'current track' seems broken when it comes to the new music service as developers of other apps have reported.

I hope that this is 'teething trouble' with the new service and can only suggest installing updates when they're available.