When writing blog posts sometimes I have to include links to downloads, other web sites and things like that. But in the haste of publishing the posts, sometimes we make mistakes and either leave the links pointing to the wrong sites, leave the link un-clickable (without the <a> anchor tag) or somehow end up making it an invalid link. Then when someone visits that web page or blog post, they have a hard time figuring out why the links are not working even after all that clicking. One way to find which links are working and which of them are invalid is by looking at the inner HTML code of the web page. But if you are a Firefox browser user, then you can make things easier by using the free LinkChecker extension.
The LinkChecker extension for Firefox adds an extra context-menu item that can be accessed by right-clicking on any webpage and selecting Check Page Links. This will make all the links on that web page checked by this extension for the validity. If the web page has too many links and you want to stop link checking in the middle, you can simply press the Esc key to interrupt the link checking.
By default, it switches the links to green if they are valid, to red if they are invalid, to grey if they cannot be checked and to yellow for non-standard links. In the options for the LinkChecker extension, you can change these colors to anything you like. You can also add some exclusions for the links so that they would be skipped during the link checking.
The LinkChecker extension if very helpful for the web designers and bloggers who want to check the links on their sites and blogs for validity, so that a visitor does not get headache while trying to click on an invalid link.
You can get the LinkChecker extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/linkchecker/.