What is Nikita?

As a Webmaster, you know that it's time-consuming to keep your site free of validation errors, broken links and other gremlins. That's doubly true for sites with multiple content authors.

This is where Nikita comes to the rescue. Nikita validates and link checks your entire Web site and reports on what she finds.

Just point Nikita to your home page – she'll take it from there and email you when she's done.

What does she report about? Bulk (or batch) (X)HTML validation and link checking are at the core of what Nikita does, but there's more to her than that. Here's a list of Nikita's main features.

• Configurable crawling
  Starting with the seed URL, Nikita crawls your site looking for pages to validate and check. She finds pages with no effort on your part – even pages you might not realize are on your site.

  By default, Nikita follows every internal link on your site except URLs that contain parameters (anything following a '?', like example.com?q=foo). But you can tell Nikita to follow those, too.

  You can also limit Nikita to a specific subtree of your site, specify a maximum number of pages to visit, or tell Nikita to ignore URLs that match a regular expression.

  Last but not least, Nikita's "politeness delay" allows you to control the speed at which she visits your site.

• (X)HTML validation
  Nikita validates every page she finds with the same technology (OpenSP) used by the W3C Validator which is the gold standard for Web page validation. Unlike the one-at-a-time W3C Validator, Nikita will validate as many pages as you like.

  Using Nikita is a great way to ensure that all of the pages on your site meet W3C standards and to find the ones that don't. (I don't mean to imply that Nikita is part of the W3C. Nikita is a private service unrelated to the W3C.)

• Link checking
  Nikita's link checker will find broken images, broken hyperlinks (both internal and external), and references to missing documents, like a missing PDF or MP3 file.

  Nikita checks the internal and outbound links that she finds on your site and tells you which links are on each page and also highlights links that didn't return an OK response.

• HTTP header checking
  Nikita looks for common errors in the headers that your server sends. For example, Nikita will warn you if she finds redirects to invalid locations or Expires headers that don't contain a date (a common mistake).
• Encoding conflicts
  A Web page's encoding (charset) can be specified in four different ways and they don't always agree. Nikita finds duplication and conflicts in your encodings and warns you about them.
• Versatile reports
  Nikita's reports give you a bird's eye view of your site as well as the nitty-gritty details of each page. They also highlight pages and links that are likely to need your attention.

  If you want to analyze your site in a way that these reports don't, you can do that, too, because Nikita also gives you XML versions of the reports so you can slice & dice the data yourself.

  You can get Nikita's reports pacakged in a ZIP file or tarball which makes them easy to review offline or share with a colleague.

• Ad hoc queries
  Nikita's Live Queries allow you to search the data that Nikita collected based on your own criteria. For instance, you can search for pages larger than 100k, URLs on your site that contain a specific word, or links that point to another site or page.
• Followup crawls
  If you create an account with Nikita and log in when starting a crawl, Nikita will remember your site. When you ask Nikita to crawl it again, you won't be charged for pages that haven't changed.

The easiest way to see what Nikita can do is to check out the sample reports.