Catch404 jQuery Plugin: Handle Broken Links with style

Aug 5, 2010

Broken links are not good from a user’s point of view. Because nothing is more frustrating than finding yourself redirected to a non-existent page. Want to stop redirecting your users to broken links or 404 pages? Get Catch404, a jQuery plugin that checks the destination URL and lets users know when the link is not available. In case of a broken link, a friendly message is displayed on your web page saying that the page is not available. So, your visitors never leaves your site for a broken link and they will never see a 404 page either. This is good both for you and your visitors. Your visitors will never feel lost and they may spend some more time on your website.

Catch404 jQuery Plugin

Catch404 is easy to use. All you need to do is include jQuery and catch404.js in your web page and then call the catch404() function on a particular selector. Then apply that particular class or id to your links. That’s it! Catch404 uses Yahoo YQL Engine to check the URL which returns a HTML string. Depending on the string response, error is handled from the same web page where the user clicked on the link. In case of a broken link, a message is displayed which you can easily configure. In the message box you can offer an alternative mirror, recommend a site search, give instructions to report broken links or provide anything you want.

Download Link: http://addyosmani.com/blog/catch404/

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