More about the checker

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson <mailbox@gunnar.cc>]

The info below might be useful, if you try to understand the checker
results.
What does the checker look for?
-------------------------------
Jock talked about displaying the text being checked for. Even if I don't
believe in displaying it together with the results, it might be a good
idea to explain here what the checker looks for on a page.
As stated on the "Check sites" page, the checker looks for certain
links. Let me explain it more exactly through an example.
Provided that I include the "list" link when I check the "demo" ring at
my site, when the Ringlink checker comes to Site 1, it looks for this
string:
href="http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/ringlink/list.pl?ringid=demo;siteid=site1"
However, the checker tolerates certain variations:
- The match is case insensitive, with the exception for the directory
  names and the file name.
- The checker accepts blank spaces including linebreaks where a
  browser would accept them.
- It's ok to state the site ID before the ring ID
- It's ok to use the character '&' between the ring ID and the
  site ID instead of ';'
Consequently, the "list" link at
http://www.gunnar.cc/ringlink/demo/site1.html passes the check.
As regards Jock's SSNB, the checker _should_ work for sites with the
JavaScript code, since it seems like the servers interpret the JS code
before they respond to requests from Ringlink.
Status codes
------------
Since the adjusted ring.pm file makes Ringlink display the status code
of the server responses, you might be interested to know what those
codes are supposed to mean. If so, please check out
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec6.html#sec6.1.1
/ Gunnar