The Most Annoying Yet Most Important Task in Website Management

Published on October 16, 2008 (↻ February 5, 2024), filed under Web Development (RSS feed for all categories).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.

…is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, but we still have to run after professionals who neglect online fundamentals or don’t set up redirects—and with that waste other people’s time.

Personally, even though I regularly do QA this doesn’t mean I myself am always handling this perfectly. Yet whenever I check links, it’s striking to me to see so many URLs changing. Link checking is not a fun job, and, in an ideal world, shouldn’t be necessary. It shouldn’t be, and yet it is. (RIP, links.)

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback for me to fix issues, learn, and improve. Thank you!

Comments (Closed)

1. On October 16, 2008, 8:50 CEST, Kroc Camen said:

   Urgh, *raises hand* I’m totally bad at doing this. Just yesterday I found at that the URLs for enclosures in my RSS feed were wrong, and had been for weeks.

   As an individual doing a personal project, I tend to just polish, polish and polish until I get to 99% and then “just ship it” and deal with the 1% failures afterwards 😛

   Note to developers:
   CHECK THE 404S IN YOUR LOGS!
   It’ll reveal a whole world of mistakes

2. On October 16, 2008, 9:28 CEST, Robert said:

   sic! 😉

3. On October 17, 2008, 11:08 CEST, Santhos said:

   Yep, that’s totally true. I always do a double check on old links and redirect them through htaccess after I’ve made changes to site structures.

   It can spare you lots of trouble and frustrated visitors (who might not come back again).

4. On November 11, 2008, 6:00 CET, Ann Arbor Web Designer said:

   I couldn’t agree more with you. Its a tedious process but it pays rich dividends.

5. On April 16, 2009, 5:08 CEST, hari said:

   yap! I am agree with ann. That process was still needed