I don't know if this is clever or not, but it was practical for me: I wanted to have some basic sanity checks on all public (i.e. non-log-in) pages of a site,

I don't know if this is clever or not, but it was practical for me: I wanted to have some basic sanity checks on all public (i.e. non-log-in) pages of a site, so I used wget to mirror it. What I was really after was the wget progress output so I could get a list of all the page URLs. I then used that to drive Watir to hit every page and a) check for any 404 or such errors and b) take a screen shot and save it off. I could then fire up an image browser and quickly see if any pages looked wonky ( missing or misaligned images images, crappy text layout, etc.). wget is very cool. :)