Making life better in disadvantaged communities - our thoughts on everything - from Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc.
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For those of you who have had the task of doing the bi-weekly website check, and for those who doesn't know what that is...
Because it is incredibly annoying to go to a website and not have links work, we assign someone every two weeks to go through our website and check the links. Inevitably, we find some pages have moved or been re-named. Often these are external links, but sometimes these are our pages where we changed the name of one page or moved it but forgot to upload all the pages that link to it.
We have thousands of links on our website. Last time we made a move to a new server, which was several months ago, we had 2,600 items to upload, and we have added a lot since.
Our new employee, Ella, was given the task of checking the links this week and reasoned there must be a more efficient way. She did a search, found a free program to do this automatically and it took only a few seconds to check the whole website. The bad news is that it found over 400 broken links. The good news is that probably 200 of those were to a few pages on this forum of spam which we take down every day. The bad news is that left over 200. The good news is that most of those could be corrected by uploading a few folders that were changed.
With our new automated method, we will be able to have fewer broken links on our site and be able to find and fix those more quickly.
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I am quite amazing, am I not?
Yes, I had been at the task for about an hour and didn't think I was even 10% done.
If anyone else would like to use the free program which saved myself hours of boredom and Dr. AnnMaria a nice chunk of pocket change, the program is called Xenu's Link Sleuth. Here is a link. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html Not only does it check regular links, it also checks for photo's which aren't loading, and some other things too, I think.
The program is for windows 95 or higher - I used it with perfect results using whatever crossover program was on the mac.
It can also be found by entering the words "find broken links" on google. It's the first link.
Last edited by Ella (2007-05-31 01:45:46)
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