Okay, so i'm getting tired of Sherlock's generalized "Network Error" dialog bitching about one of my many internet search site plug-ins failing.
Sherlock doesn't tell you
which plug-in failed (what's with that any way?... protecting the names of the innocent or something?)
It's a pain in the rear to disable the plug-in's and, by a process of trial and error elimination, figure out which plug-in is no longer working. If there's a way to verify Sherlock plug-ins, i'd sure love to know about it.
But i'm thinking there isn't a way, so i decided to write an AppleScript to verify each plug-in. I've got the script scanning plug-ins and isolating the URL Sherlock is trying to connect to, but i'm having trouble verifying the URL. I can think of some inelegant ways to do so with app's like web browsers, Fetch, Anarchie, etc. But i'd like my script to run on any Macintosh without any third party app's or OSAXen.
So how to verify a URL?
The best i can come up with is to use Apple's "URL Access Scripting" app to download the page at the other end of the URL, trash it, and move on.
But i may not be able to detect "404 page not found" errors and the like as the server is likely to return something which looks like a file
(even if it is dynamically generated). What i'd like to be able to do is capture error codes like a 404 error. Anyone with experience doing this from AppleScript, or any ideas on other approaches?
I'm going to try playing with scripting Sherlock a bit to see if i'm overlooking an obvious solution in that direction.
Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestions.
[ 01-05-2002: Message edited by: Rainy Day ]
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