Sunday, February 28, 2010

Cleaning up teh blog

Last summer, I made a monumentous decision: I gave up teh WordPress.

All the lousy details are here. But I've used teh Blogger, teh TypePad, and teh WordPress for teh blog. And they all have their great points, and their weaknesses. Anyway, I've landed on teh Blogger again. But all these changes over the years have meant that some things need to be cleaned up. And I hate doing that. But, I gotta.

One of the most aggravating things is, during the transfer of some posts from one platform to another, I broke some links. How many links? Well, teh Google has a service called Webmaster Tools. And the latest report says I have 556 broken links.

Now, some of these links are to Websites that have gone dark. But the vast majority of them are links that are simply broken and can be fixed. Let me explain.

When we were on teh WordPress, we often made links like this:
  • /2009/01/my-post/
instead of
  • http://basilsblog.net/2009/01/my-post/
Why? Well, WordPress would automatically generate a TrackBack ping. And I didn't care for pings to my own stuff. Nothing wrong with them, just a personal preference.

But, I knew that on a Web page, if you leave off the "http://" part, it would automatically put it there for you. That's why these are essentially the same link:
  • /2009/01/my-post/
  • http://basilsblog.net/2009/01/my-post/
And, that's why, if you've ever put a link in a Web page and left off the "http://" part, you got some odd results. For example, if I made this link:
  • www.imao.us/about/
It would actually try to go to this:
  • http://www.basilsblog.net/www.imao.us/
Don't ask why. It's how it works. So, today's tip: Always verify your links.

But back to this little blog's 556 broken links...

I had many links like that. Those are all broken. For two reasons.

First, on teh Blogger, if you put a link with no leading domain, and just make one like this:
  • /2010/02/my-post.html
It will translate at
  • http://www.blogger.com/2010/02/my-post.html
Because the interface where you write the post is on a blogger.com domain.

If all this is confusing, the thing to learn from it is, you can't take shortcuts with links on teh Blogger.

And I've got a butt-load of those kind of links.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But, had I done the link in the standard way, I'd still have a problem.

WordPress uses a different naming style than does Blogger. So, the pages have slightly different names. And, on them Internets, slightly different means way different.

So, though I might have created some issues, if I had done different, I'd still have just as many broken links.

Today, I begin fixing the links. Because I care. Would any other blogger do that for you? No. Because they're selfish. And self-centered.

I bet they even have their own name in their custom URL.

3 comments:

  1. I'll check back in JEWVEMBER when you finish fixing links....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ummm...Basil, you am a better man than I'm iz...

    I'd just figure nobody cared about anything I wrote in the past. Of course, I figure nobody cares about anything I write in the present, too.

    And, I AM CORRECT!

    I forgot about "JEWVEMBER." I thought it was "JEW LIE."

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm thinking it might take a bit on this. I wish I hadn't even checked the stats, now.

    ReplyDelete

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