BS MapScout
An in-house tool that maps every business in a ZIP code, then loads each one's website to see whether it still works. No API key, no account, no install step.
We wanted to know which businesses near us have a web presence that has quietly stopped working — a lapsed domain, a dead host, a page that never got finished. That information is scattered across public map data and the live web, and neither source is trustworthy on its own. Map data has gaps and stale links; a site that fails to load once may just be having a bad minute.
The harder problem is the one that never shows up in a demo: being wrong. Telling a business their website is broken when it is fine is worse than saying nothing at all.
One Node process with no dependencies — less a stylistic choice than a practical one, since a tool nobody has to install is a tool that still runs in a year. The HTTP server, the file access and the database all come from Node's own standard library, including its built-in SQLite. There is no install step because there is nothing to install.
A scan runs in three passes. Find the ZIP's boundary on OpenStreetMap, pull every business mapped inside it — typically four to eight hundred in a city ZIP, with chains and franchises dropped — then load every website it found and record what actually happened. Results land in four buckets: confirmed broken, no site listed, social-only where a Facebook page or a Linktree is standing in for a website, and working.
Findings appear on a map and in a list, linked both ways: click a result to fly the map to it, click a map dot to jump back to the card. Three OpenStreetMap mirrors are configured and it fails over between them automatically, because the free servers are volunteer-run and get busy.
The checker is deliberately biased toward silence. Sites that block automated requests — 403, 429, anything sitting behind a bot filter — are recorded as working and never flagged, because a block is not evidence of a fault. Timeouts and server errors are retried before they count, since both blip. Only unambiguous failures are reported: the domain does not resolve, the connection is refused, the page returns a 404, the certificate is invalid, or the page is a parking placeholder. It misses some genuinely broken sites as a result. That is the trade it is tuned for.
The limits are written into the documentation rather than left for someone to discover. OpenStreetMap under-maps businesses that work out of a truck, so results skew toward places with a storefront. A missing website in map data usually means no mapper added one, not that none exists — which makes that bucket a list of candidates, not conclusions. One run across a downtown Orlando ZIP mapped 479 businesses and confirmed 41 whose site no longer loads, in about three minutes at no cost.
Every setting lives in one file that is meant to be edited: which business types to pull, which chains to drop, what text marks a page as parked, how many sites to test at once. The whole dataset is a single SQLite file, so backing the tool up means copying one file.