The Most Annoying Yet Most Important Task in Website Management

Post from October 16, 2008 (↻ December 12, 2016), filed under Web Development.

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

…is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, so it is just annoying to run after professionals who either don’t know online basics or how to set up redirects, and with that waste other people’s time.

Even though I regularly do QA this doesn’t mean that I’m always handling this perfectly. It’s just striking for me to observe so many people changing URIs without thinking. And I wonder, maybe with the goal to send people away and lose potential customers? Link checking is not a fun job, and shouldn’t be necessary. It shouldn’t, and yet it is so important. (RIP.)

About the Author

Jens Oliver Meiert is an author and developer (O’Reilly, W3C, ex-Google). He plays with philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com he shares and generalizes and exaggerates some of his thoughts and experiences. (Beware: More often than he wants it he’s wrong.)

There’s more Jens in the archives and at Goodreads. If you have any questions or concerns (or recommendations) about what he writes, leave a comment or a message.

Comments (Closed)

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

sic! 😉
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).
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.
On April 16, 2009, 5:08 CEST, hari said:

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

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