Here are two unrelated yet equally-cool freeware tools I recently discovered:

Xenu Link Sleuth is a small windows app that will spider your site and report any broken links or graphics it finds. Back in the day I used an online tool for this that would do the same thing called websitegarage.com. It was later acquired by Microsoft bCentral and now appears to be out of business. This little app is great at what it does though and it can even connect to your site via ftp and report orphaned files based on what it was able to spider. I just used it to check my company’s corporate site and it found a few links that were bad as well as one directory that had a permissions problem.

Sequoia View is freeware windows app developed by the CS department of some university in the Netherlands. I needed to do a little spring cleaning on my laptop to free up some hard drive space. When I used to have a Mac there was actually a freeware app called “Spring Cleaning” that was great for giving you a visual overview of how your hard drive space was consumed. It would walk the contents of your drive recursively and produce a bar chart that filled the screen where the left-most column represented the space consumed by your top-level directories, then to the right it drilled further and further until you had as many columns as you had subdirectories on your computer. This worked but produced a report that was VERY difficult to interpret with thin slivers representing each directory. Sequoia View has an ingenious interface that uses what are called “squarified treemaps” or cusion maps (because their shading makes it look like a quilt of cusions knitted together) to represent the contents of your hard drive. It gives a complete visual snapshot of how space is allocated color-coding on filetype and allowing you to see exactly where the problem files are drill down to the directories right from the snapshot view to get rid of them. I found out I had an 800MB pagefile and an 800MB hiberfil.sys which both could be deleted plus a bunch of temp directories that were out of control. Two great little apps I wanted to pass along – nice!