Broken link Extension

Broken link extension that sends owner an email with issues and potential fixes

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Inspiration

While developing our Pod website for the orientation hackathon, we found that many links were broken and we could not catch the broken links before we submitted the site. Thousands of Web-developers around the world face the same issue on a daily basis, and even if they do try to check for broken links, they have to do so manually one-by-one, which is very tedious and time-consuming. This got us thinking, what if we made a Google Chrome Extension that can automate the process? That would allow us to focus on other important things that we need to work on!

What it does

Our Chrome Extension, Linker, grabs all broken links from a deployed site. The user can opt to either get a list of all the broken links on the site the extension was run on via mail (E-mail ID input is required), or as a Chrome alert (no input required, in case you don't want to give out your Email ID. BTW we don't store any personal data like your ID, it's one-time-use-only :P).

How we built it

We primarily used Javascript to develop the extension, and Google Chrome extension fundamentals.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into CORS errors, and had to learn about the background and foreground consoles and how to make them interact with each other to pass data from one to the other.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We learnt a LOT, both technically, and also how to work and collaborate as a team! We're proud of the fact that even though none of us have developed any extensions before, we were able to finish developing something that we can launch on the Chrome Web Store immediately!

What we learned

We learned a lot about Javascript, how to make back and foreground consoles interact, a LOT about how extensions work, and how to work with APIs.

What's next for Broken link Extension

We have plans to deploy a similarity-based link recommendation system for Github repos, and an NLP classification model to predict what caused the error (wrong spelling, invalid regular expressions/regex, etc.)

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