Broken Link Checker Has Saved the Blogroll
If you have noticed that the blogroll is currently free of spam or broken links, you can thank Lori who told me about my shiny new plug-in that culls out all the broken links. It combed through all 3000+ on the blogroll and told me which ones were password-protected (no point in having them on the regular blogroll section since people can’t click over to read), deleted, or now led to spam sites since they had been abandoned. It also went through the other 20,000+ links on my blog and culled out all the dead ones, so links have been deleted all over the place though the text remains (except for the blogroll — I went through and deleted those unlinked to blogs).
Of course this doesn’t mean that every blog is in the correct category — there are still a bunch that are out of place — nor does it mean that I’ve taken down blogs that have stopped posting since I think there is a lot of worth in the archives. But at least everything you’re going to click on is going to take you to a blog.
My only fear is that in the deleting frenzy that legitimate links or temporarily problematic links were removed. So if you want to check to make sure you’re still on it, use the search engine on the left sidebar of my blog. Put the name of your blog inside quotation marks so it only searches for times that your entire blog title comes up vs. every time the words appear on their own. It should pull up your room on the blogroll. Please make sure that if you ever changed the name of your blog that you search under all its past incarnations since it may still be there except under a different name.
The plug-in will continue to let me know when blogs have been deleted so the blogroll should stay relatively neat. Now I just need to shift people around.
11 comments
I think you mean the search engine on the right-hand sidebar, Mel. ; ) But kudos to Lori — what a great find!! : )
Fantabulous! Love time-saving devices (when they actually save time) 🙂
No, I definitely mean left. It’s under the heading “search this site.” If you use the right one, it will search all infertility blogs vs. just Stirrup Queens.
Ah — gotcha. ; )
What is this plug-in? Can you share?
Nice!
@Mrs Spock: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Fabulous, Mel. I’m so glad this helped and I’m sorry I didn’t think to mention it earlier!
I am in the list but as I haven’t blogged for a bit (ages) Blogger has moved me without so much as a by your leave to a co.uk address from a .com one so the link doesn’t work. I’ve corrected it in my signature.
Yay to deleting links to spam sites.
Bea
Speaking of spam sites. Cyclesista.com now points to a spam site.
This pisses me off for all sorts of reasons pertaining to my negotiations with the company to try and get the domain transferred into my name… a paying customer… who is not a spammer… or even a business woman but just trying to run a patient support group vs a paying customer who is a spammer and is therefore ok to sell the name to, because if there’s one group domain name registers should be supporting it’s spammers, right? Where was I?
Anyway. I don’t know if you can search and replace cyclesista.com with cyclesista.org on the blogroll.
http://www.cyclesista.org/
You know, in your free time 😉
Bea
Awesome, just awesome, Mel. So glad there is a technology solution to something I know is an otherwise huge time-suck, managing the blogroll.