Ugh. So here’s what I learned while banishing broken links…

* Broken Link Checker isn’t completely intuitive, but as of this date it’s current and supported. If you have a question you may not get the answer you’re looking for, but you’ll get an answer, and you’ll profit from it.

* Over the past year the BLC plugin reported (via email) in fits and starts for reasons I did not understand. In reading up and poking around, however, I discovered a ‘server load’ setting which seems to act like a throttle. If you set it very low — meaning lower than the reported server load — you effectively idle BLC until the server load drops. Or at least I think that’s what happens. In any case, when I raised the number above the reported load, BLC sprang into action, so if you’re not getting activity when you expect it I would check that setting. (Also, if you’re on shared hosting, consider changing that setting at night when the server load is low. BLC may run much faster.)

* When you’re working on each individual broken link, going slowly and searching for missing pages on the web can be surprisingly fruitful. I fixed quite a few dead links where the missing page’s URL had been altered without a redirect. Once located, copying and pasting the current active link in place of the broken link solved the problem.

* I initially decided to deal with a minimum of twenty-five links each day, but the first day was tough. As it turned out, however, much of the struggle was due to the fact that I had no process or workflow to follow, so what I was really fighting was the learning curve, not the task. On the second day I probably fixed or killed fifty or so links, then the following day I finished off the remaining sixty or so, meaning it took me three days to get through my backlog. (If you’re in the weeds like I was, or worse, just make link-fixing a chore that you come back to again and again until it’s done.)  [ Read more ]

Whatever my favorite blog post title used to be, it is now a distant second to this one.

So what is link rot? It’s decay that happens to a linked document over time as links become unresponsive. You add links to pages on other sites, some of those pages disappear or are moved, and suddenly your links don’t work any more.

On a case-by-case basis it’s a nuisance. Over time, and over an entire website, it’s a horror. Across an entire discipline, like law, it’s potentially crippling. Speaking of which….

More than a year ago now I found a couple of dead links in an old post, which made me realize I had no way to find such links on a proactive basis. After using a few web-based spiders to search my site and report on dead links, and finding them wanting, I came across a WordPress plugin called — appropriately — Broken Link Checker.

Installing and running BLC was easy, but the results were frightening. At the time I had over 150 reported broken links, although on closer inspection some of those proved to be links that timed out. Still, 150+ bad links was plenty, yet when I earnestly set about trying to solve the problem I realized I didn’t know how.

Yes, I could see that a link pointed to a page that was no longer available, but how to note that in context so the reader would understand? Worse, what if a whole paragraph was written around the presumption of a link?

Just knowing about the problem has allowed me to be a little smarter about writing link text. For example, in the paragraph above, where I mentioned law, the article I linked to is on Gigaom.com, which went belly-up only a few weeks back. At some point that link will probably be reported dead because the content on Gigaom will no longer be available, but that sentence will still be intelligible without it. It won’t be substantiated, but it will still make sense.

Maddeningly, however, as simple as the problem seems — fix dead links — in practice it has repeatedly proved insurmountable. I psych myself up, I dig into BLC, I fix one or two broken links — usually the easiest ones — then flop back, mentally exhausted.

Searching for sage advice on the interweb reveals fraught awareness of the problem, but few good solutions I can put into practice. Or solutions that are overkill. (Oops — that sentence won’t make much sense when that link dies.)

Since I first installed BLC days have turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into a year, and…well, here I am. Still with 150+ dead links reported.

So it’s time to do something about the problem. I don’t know what that’s going to be, and I suspect it’s going to be a fight all the way, but I’ve got a little time now and nothing better to do. And believe me, I tried to find something better to do.

They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. I have a problem. I have link rot.

— Mark Barrett