Site Spring Cleaning

I have spent nearly every night this week procrastinating going back through old entries to tidy up typos, remove dead links and tag where necessary. I am now going through the “Just Blogged” threads on various forums so that the links point to accurate URLs rather than 404s.

Of course, sense would say that it’d have been easier not to update my URL structure and therefore not cause broken links, but this is easier said than done when you’re switching and changing between content management systems. Not only that, but I picked the most stupid URL structure when I used WordPress (domain.com/post-name is not a good idea) and so re-writes are being a bit flaky.

In honour of my updates I am asking you all very nicely to have a quick peek at any places on your own websites where you know you guys are linking to me and update any 404ing URLs. Pretty please :)

17 comments so far

  1. Aisling said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:32 pm

    No, YOU go through my site and find where I’m linking you wrong. >:|

    … I’m kidding. I’ll do it. But you have to let me sleep on your floor if I ever go to England. :P

  2. Vasili said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:41 pm

    I just linked to one of your articles yesterday, so I hope the structure didn’t change that much over night. :P

    I really need to make a 404 page. :|

  3. Jem said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:47 pm

    @Aisling: deal!

    @Vasili: no, the structure change was from December & only the blog URLs have altered.

  4. Jordan said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:47 pm

    Have you just been referencing a list of 404s generated through Mint to find majority of them?

  5. Aisling said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:50 pm

    Okay, I updated the one entry where I linked to something more specific than just jemjabella.co.uk.

    Ha. Nice. I got cheap accommodation in England for two seconds worth of work! :P

  6. Jem said:
    On 22 Jan at 8:56 pm

    @Jordan: no, I needed to re-tag entries when moving from WP so I’ve just edited every post. However, if you’re looking for a good way to find 404s I recommend Xenu Link Sleuth (windows only)

  7. TWD said:
    On 22 Jan at 11:52 pm

    Ouch, that sounds like a big pain. Why exactly is domain.com/post-name a bad idea?

  8. Hev said:
    On 23 Jan at 1:05 am

    Well, I always link you to your url here & then just tell people how to get where they need to go. I don’t need to change anything else, right?

  9. Christine said:
    On 23 Jan at 1:45 am

    My links to you are a-ok! I do have a question tho. If "domain.com/post-name is not a good idea" what is the alternative you would use? Cause I think that’s the way my site works too. ./worried

  10. Vasili said:
    On 23 Jan at 2:18 am

    ^ You could add /entry/post-title or /year/day/month/post-title. Anything that gives two bits of information. :)

  11. Jem said:
    On 23 Jan at 10:04 am

    domain.com/post-name is only a bad idea if you plan on altering the structure of your site, or moving your URLs at a later date, because it makes it very hard to set up redirects to the correct URLs without breaking other things.

  12. Julie said:
    On 23 Jan at 11:23 am

    Link whore.

  13. Chans said:
    On 23 Jan at 11:37 am

    Changing link structures can be such a hassle. I’ll go through my site to see if I can find anything that is broken and fix it, I hate linking to dead URLs :)

  14. Marieke said:
    On 23 Jan at 5:49 pm

    I will try to tell you when I come across one.
    Good luck with it though ^^.

  15. John said:
    On 23 Jan at 6:20 pm

    Oh, this could get annoying, good luck.

    By the way, what happened to tutoiraltasitc?

  16. Katie said:
    On 23 Jan at 6:26 pm

    I keep thinking I might want to go through and clean up/tag my blog but man, it seems like a lot of work :|

  17. Jem said:
    On 23 Jan at 6:29 pm

    @John: it’s a site5 cock-up