Pushing back against web entropy
- 1 minIf maintaining a website is akin to gardening, then dead link checking is collecting slugs.
Both are jobs you have to do. Really, you’d rather not do either.
Outgoing
There are great tools to help. Bernard is a simple interface for checking links. No fuss. No frills. It had a good hit rate when compared to some of the free tool that’s been around for a while, paired up with a straightforward interface.
A whole load of sites that were linked to from here have closed down in the years since, as part of web contents continual trend of entropy. Keeping this site healthy with solid links is a part of the website gardening cycle, and in this instance it was especially straight forward.
Updating
This week, Software Cornwall rebranded to Tech Cornwall as part of a broader refresh. With a bunch of blog posts on this site from the past decade about interactions with the org, there are a fair number of links to their site. Whilst the domain is forwarding for the moment, and probably will for some time yet, entropy is inevitable.
Updating references to the organisation will insure against future link rot, and send them some SEO love. A few quick find and replace commands later, and the markdown that backs the site is brought in line with the current reality.
I’m happy with this quick update, although there is something slightly 1984 about rewriting the past in this way
