Blogged
Weeding in the blog garden
Most of my blog activity over the last couple of days has taken place behind the scenes. I spent some time this weekend adding plugin-driven functionalities like “similar posts” and “recent posts,” which I trust will make the visitor’s time here more enjoyable. (Both of these plugins are creations of a gentleman who, in addition to being a WordPress savant, is also a Jesuit priest. Awesome.) Later, prompted by a reminder that visitors to older posts have been running into the odd dead link, I searched for and easily found another great WordPress plugin that folds neatly into the blog’s administration and compiles a list of broken links, both internal and external.
That was the good news. The somewhat more sobering news came as the count of dead links in my blog entries kept climbing. And climbing. The grand total turned out to be some eighteen hundred links to Nowheresville: URIs of news articles that are no longer accessible, permalinks to blog posts that had either moved or had been deleted. Even I had added to the bonepile with dead internal links - connected to older posts that I had written back when the blog was using numerical permalink code instead of words. Yikes.
So I’ve been doing some needed weeding, about three hundred links’ worth so far. Chief annoyances have been the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Washington Post, and CNN, all of which wish their articles to an archive cornfield and leave linked bloggers scrambling for alternate sources. Eliminating this link blight is tedious work, but necessary and long overdue. The benefit of the link checker plugin is that I’ll be able to regularly monitor link status as a matter of course, so once we’re past the triage stage, this will just be a matter of routine maintenance. All good.
Note: I’ve noticed that many - perhaps most - articles and entries on the Web that talk about broken links do so from a search engine optimization standpoint. All well and good, especially for bloggers actually doing actual business, but this isn’t why I’m cleaning out the linkrot. Like many bloggers, I started out terribly concerned about SEO and traffic and Google Pagerank and Technorati and the TTLB Ecosystem and blah blah blah….but over time, I outgrew that kind of thinking. Sounds haughty enough, but there it is. Visibility and whatever influence comes with it no longer intrigues me as much as it once did.*
So much for SEO. Now the visitor experience…that’s something else again. Better that someone reading this site have a good time than a bad one. That’s a fine guideline, I think. So back to weeding.
*Hmm. While thinking along these lines, I think I came to a decision about ads.
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I always have a good time here. I take the fun with me, doncha know?
Speaking of good times, The Last Homely House?
Didn’t want to talk about House until it got closer but…yes, in the works, a lot of work to do, my own dumb fault. Story of my life, actually. :-\
Ok. We won’t talk about House. I never said anything. ;)
You and I were doing similar things. I started working on my blog rehab around Sunday afternoon, late, with the mistaken idea I’d have everything ready to upload for Monday.
Dead wrong.
I was using a dummy blog using “New Blogger” to rebuild my blog the way I wanted it to look, and thinking I could simply paste the template into my real blog when it was ready to go.
Naturally, this resulted in chaos. Readable chaos, thankfully, but chaos nonetheless.
Surprisingly, I didn’t have a freak-out moment involving dishes thrown against a wall, but I easily could have.
Only because of my experience in building stuff in New Blogger did I calm down and realize all was not lost. I could do this in real-time and most visitors would only see the finished product as I intended since I don’t exactly have dozens of people visiting every few minutes.
Thank God for all small miracles.
What a trip this is.
And the frustrating thing, always, is that you figure you’ve pretty well plotted things out…and then it’s all gang aft a-frigging-gley.
Congrats on maintaining rationality during the rebuild; it’s a hard thing to manage. I always tell myself that it’ll be years before I revise the blog again, has to be, because the stress is just overwhelming.