If I open a web page that has many (100 or more) blue hyperlinks, is
there any way (shortcut, hotkey etc) to make all those hyperlinks turn
purple (or whatever)as if I had clicked on each of them? I would
prefer to just change the color, but if it actually opened those
links, I guess that would be OK too, if I could easly close all of
them at once or very quickly. I have a several pages that I want to
monitor for changes by looking for blue hyperlinks (new links).
Sometimes I don't get back to the page for several days and all links
are new. I want to change all links to be purple, then monitor after
that.

Hi, 

Interesting question, but the answer I'm afraid is no. The hyperlink
color is controlled by your browser with basic "a href" tags. Changing
the colors of them is an option for the creator of the website, using
css (Cascading Style Sheets) but that won't help you. The browser
changes the color to purple if the page the link is pointing to, is in
your browser's cache. If you clear your cache, then all of them will
turn blue again.

Some browsers allow you to change the color of the hyperlinks, and I
could point you to some of those, but it would be misleading. There
are three color states of a hyperlink, new, hover, and visited. If you
changed all the "new" ones to purple and the visited ones remained
purple, you would not get the effect you are looking for, because all
of them would now be purple. Changing them to any other color puts you
in the same state you are in now with blue.

If you have some, or even little programming experience I would
recommend a small Perl script on your computer to check the pages for
new link entries and simply list out for you any new ones. The same
small script could also let you know if the links are valid (Really go
to a page and not an 404 error page).

davidsar-ga and j_philipp-ga have comments below for alternative
solutions. j_philipp-ga's is good for short term, but as he states,
sooner or later your cache is going to clear and all are going to be
blue again. Also, your cache can be cleared by several other things.
The cache is a temporary file area, and is treated as such on most
systems. Also, there is a problem with many browsers if the cache is
allowed to grow to large I.E. is historically one of these. The
smaller your cache, the better the browser works most of the time.


webadept-ga

Hello Geekbeme,

One thing that might help is to extend the period of days links will
be remembered as "visited". This would mean that even if you visit the
link list after many months, every visited link would still be purple.
E.g. in Internet Explorer 6, you go to Tools -> Internet Options ->
History, where you can enter a new higher "Days"-value.

Another possibility is to use a web monitoring agent to keep an eye
out for any changes to any sites you specify -- the agent will notify
you when, e.g., a new link is added to a site.  You can find a list of
such agents on many internet sites, such as:

http://www.botspot.com/BOTSPOT/Windows/Tracking_Bots/Web_Monitoring_Bots/

Some of them are freeware...what could be better?

Another approach is to use an "open all links" bookmarklet, such as
this one:
http://www.sawks.com/bookmarklets/

If you click the "open external links" hyperlink on that webpage, it
will open up a new window for each link. When you revisit the original
page, all the external links will have changed from blue to purple.

Instructions are provided to install the bookmarklet into your own
browser. You can then open all external links for any page you like,
just by selecting the bookmark entry for that bookmarklet.

As others have pointed out, there are some issues with cache sizes and
lifetimes. You may also run into problems with over 100 new windows
being opened at once. But it works for me.

The bookmarklet is written in javascript. A javascript expert (not
me!) could probably modify it to close each new window immediately
after it has been opened.

Regards,
eiffel-ga

None of this will work if the developer of the page hasn't set a
visited link color, just want to point that out.