Manually Fixing Broken Bookmarks

When you click Fix... in the last column of the Broken Bookmarks Report, Bookdog opens a Broken Bookmark window which shows you, one at a time, the broken bookmarks which require your attention.  With each one, you get a diagnosis and suggested treatment.  You may click one of the Test buttons to visit the site and see for youself.  You should also do this if you suspect that the site is actually OK, because of course all web sites and the internet fail to respond sometime, and the site may be been unavailable during Bookdog's verify operations. 

In fixing a bookmark, you may edit its url by simply typing into the field, change to the proposed URL by hitting the "Copy" button, or if you find a better url after testing in Safari you may drag and drop it from Safari's URL field to Bookdog's "URL you now have field".  You may also want to click the Edit button to change its name or folder location.

In order to finish with a broken bookmark and move on to the next one, you must click one of the buttons at the bottom of the window:

If you change your mind, in the Edit menu click Undo.


Tips on Fixing URLs

Although Bookdog is pretty smart, fixing broken bookmarks is not an exact science, and often only you can correct the situation after visiting the site yourself.  You can manually edit the url.

"They both work!"  Often, a bookmark which has a 302 "found" or "moved temporarily" redirect, you will find that both the url you now have and the proposed new url take you to the same web page.  Should you copy the new one or click False Alarm and continue to use your old one?  You must use your judgment, including your knowledge of how solid is the organization behind the website.  If you see that the domain (the "main" part of the url, for example "sheepsystems.com") has changed, then probably you should copy the new domain.  But if you see that the proposed url ends with alot of nonsense such as "?sessionID=7A451E42" (technically called the query part of the url), then maybe you should try the new domain but delete this query (the part that begins with the question-mark "?").  In many cases, both urls will continue to work for a long time, so don't spend too much time worrying about it.

Multiple Errors.  Sometimes there are multiple errors in urls; for example, it may redirect you to a different url which turns out to not exist either.  It takes two Verify/Fix operations to fix this one!  Again, don't worry about these; you'll get them the next time.

Sites down in wee hours.  Websites are more likely to be down for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance during the wee hours of the morning, resulting in temporarily broken bookmarks  Therefore, it is better to do Verify during normal business hours.

"I Can Never Fix All My Bookmarks!"  Please appreciate that your bookmarks collection is not really "yours".  Whether or not they "work" at any given time depends on the internet, and on each webmaster whose site you have bookmarked.  All of these are ever-changing and imperfect.  It is interesting to repeat the Verify and Fix Broken process a second time, but any more than that will be frustrating.  Say you've got 1000 bookmarks, fix all of them except 5 which you think are temporary problems, and then re-run verify.  Surprise!  Some of your broken bookmarks will have fixed themselves, and you'll get a few new errors from sites which were OK the first time.  Bookdog's re-checking of nonresponders is quite effective, but often sites are unavailable for minutes at a time.  Ninety-nine percent availability (10 errors out of 1000 bookmarks) is typical.  That being said, if you believe that Bookdog is consistently reporting false alarms for a popular site which you feel must have a competent webmaster, or vice versa, send us an email.  We'll investigate and see if we can improve our algorithm.

Parallel Servers.  Many web sites are hosted with parallel servers (computers) to distribute the traffic load, and these are often indicated in the url with a small number following the server name.  For example:

These are different servers that all handle requests which are distributed to them from www.sheepsystems.com.  Any of them may be down, moved or permanently taken out of service at any time.  Therefore, when you are adding a bookmark to a site with a server name like this, you should immediately edit its url to indicate instead the "parent" server, which in this example is "http://www.sheepsystems.com".

Shoppers out there will also often see this with a "store" server, for example

        http://store2.esellerate.net/store/catalog.aspx?s=STR6837001335&pc=

is one of three "store" servers used by our distributor, esellerate.  The correct url for our store is:

        http://store.esellerate.net/store/catalog.aspx?s=STR6837001335&pc=

Bookdog knows about this problem and ignores "302" redirects to most parallel servers during Verify.