Find who needs the work.
A whole town's businesses in one pass, ordered so the ones in real trouble are the first thing you see. No trawling listings one by one to find them.
Find the local business websites that are failing their owners.
Name a town and a trade. It reads each listed website once and shows what is broken, with proof.
How it works
No account, no login, and no word with the business.
Name a town and a trade.
Every matching business on the free public map, and which ones list a website.
It opens each one, once.
The way a customer's phone would, checking the parts that decide whether they stay or leave.
You get a short list.
Worst first, each with what is wrong. Sites it could not read are set aside, never blamed.
What people use it for
Four jobs, all off the same run.
Turn up knowing the problem.
You can name the thing that is wrong and point at where it is, instead of offering a vague audit.
Keep an eye on sites you look after.
Run it again next month. A domain lapses, a link rots, a menu goes missing, and you hear it from the tool rather than the owner.
Write about it without naming anyone.
One command strips every name, domain and phone number and keeps the place, the date and every measurement, so the findings can be published and still checked.
Where the information comes from
The rules it works under, so you know what a finding is worth.
- The public map
- Businesses come from OpenStreetMap, the free map anyone can read. No account, no paid data, no scraping a search engine. A listing with no website recorded is counted as exactly that, never as a business without a website.
- One visit, at walking pace
- One request at a time, with a pause between sites, and a site's robots.txt is honoured. Nothing is visited twice to pad a result, and a site that says no is left alone.
- Every finding keeps its proof
- A finding is not an opinion. The measurement it rests on and the value that was recorded are stored beside it, so anyone can open the page and see the same thing.
- Nobody gets contacted
- It reads public pages and writes files on your machine. It sends no email, fills in no forms, and tells no business it was looked at. What you do next is your call.
Try it on a town you know.
Disrepair is free and open source, and it has no dependencies. It runs from the command line and needs Node 20 or newer.