The Most Annoying Yet Most Important Task in Website Management

Post from October 16, 2008 (↻ August 27, 2021), filed under Web Development.

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 it’s annoying to run after professionals who neglect online basics or don’t know how to set up redirects—and with that waste other people’s time. [This was a bit harsh.]

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 people change URLs without thinking. And I wonder, sometimes with a goal of sending people away? Link checking is not a fun job, and, in an ideal world, shouldn’t be necessary. It shouldn’t, and yet it’s so important. (RIP.)

About Me

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead—currently manager for Developer Experience at LivePerson—and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

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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

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