Resources to Check for Dead Links on a Website

http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
This external service hits your site and follows each link.  It is intelligent enough to check for loops.  Since it is an external service, it may artificially drive up hit count.


Check My Links Chrome Extension
This very handy chrome extension checks link status and places the results in-line.  Fairly turn-key, it even keeps a list of links to not follow that you can add to as you go along.  It seems to have trouble with blogspot controls and extensions, though adding them to the blacklist might be the solution.

Xenu's Link Sleuth
Heard about this one on UTest.  I am eager to try it out.  Free, long history, and automatable: all the right pieces for success.

Add more as you find them to the comments.

StarWest 2014

I viewed StarWest's Virtual Conference offering again.  This and the affiliated Better Software conference are run by Techwell.  A few observations.

1. I loved the talk on Healthcare.gov given by Ben Simo (@QualityFrog).  He communicates how easy it would have been to predict, find and fix the problems that would plague that site for more than a year.  It was a good choice putting him on keynote.
2. To attend one of these conferences will run you or your company into the thousands of dollars.  Attending the tutorials is even more.  This in spite of being sponsored by some of the biggest software providers in the industry.  We are bombarded by ads for the latest ALM or bug tracking tool and they are called talks.  What is such sponsorship getting the attendees?  Who is benefiting from this other than the organizers?  If the conference organizers were a not-for-profit, would they charge the same amount?
3. The online offering tries to simulate the networking opportunities for those who could not attend.  It tries to simulate the marketing side too by giving attendees contact info to vendors.  What about the testing opportunities?  With more than half the talks about web app testing, why aren't tutorial sites and learning apps available and promoted to virtual attendees?

Maybe DEF CON has spoiled me.  $200 for the most frenetic hands-on conference over twice the number of days?  A lot of that is a labor of love and volunteers, but then again most of it is also not sponsored by corporations too.  Maybe I need to bring DEF CON to testers, or testers to DEF CON.  See what shakes out.

Cards Against Mormonism

My brother and I grew up Mormon, but we no longer identify as such.  Nevertheless, the culture is unique, and there are many opportunities for squick, in-jokes and dark humor.  So, like everyone and their mothers, we decided to roll some of those up into an unofficial Cards Against Humanity expansion: Cards Against Mormonism.  A reminder: you may not get some of the jokes if you have never been Mormon, lived in Utah or or are otherwise considered a Gentile.  However, we took great pains to limit the amount of Utah-specific jokes.

The cards themselves were brainstormed under the influence of alcohol and put through the refiner's fire until about 100 unique cards (33 Black and 80 White) emerged.  Once the list was solid, we copied it into the brilliant Cards Against Humanity custom card batch processor.  It worked flawlessly the first time marking Pick 2's and adjusting fonts as needed.  This spat out two PDFs perfect for printing your own Mormon expansion to Cards Against Humanity.

This set is formatted to match the free print-and-play PDF still available on the CAH Website.  Like that set, it is shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.  You can see the original doc with those that did and didn't make it in Google Docs if you want to try your own hand at it and bring some apostasy to game night.

Sincerely,
DuncanYoudaho and FannyAlgersAbortion

Download Links:
White Cards
Black Cards