Website Broken Links (Mostly Not Oracle-Related)

In a recent twitter exchange someone asked if I scan for broken links, oh if you only knew, and the answer is yes. I don’t do it all the time as the results can be rather depressing, and I am OCD enough to force myself to fix them. I also get people notifying me of them, which is very welcome, so I am always trying to keep on top of this stuff. Based on that exchange I thought it was about time, so I logged on the sitecrawl.net and started a new scan.

As usual, the number of internal broken links were low. I had a couple of typos in links that are now corrected.

Typically I am greeted by hundreds of broken links to Oracle documentation, but thankfully this time that was pretty good. Only about 30, many of which were to ORDS docs.

Probably the biggest offenders this time were:

• Google : They dropped the Picassa URLs, so lots of blog posts had to be amended.
• Twitter. Now it’s not actually Twitter’s fault, but there were a lot of twitter accounts in the blog comments that no longer exist. I’m not even talking about those that are obvious people trying to promote their brand, but regular users too. I didn’t realise ditching your Twitter account was such a big thing.
• URL Shortners : Either the URL shortener reference no longer exists, the thing it points to no longer exists, or a retweet has chopped off the URL, so it is just junk.

I’ve been pretty merciless with some of this stuff. Rather than wasting a whole weekend, it’s only taken about 2 hours to get things ship-shape.

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer. View all posts by Tim...