There are over 3500 blog posts going back as far as early 2005. In that time frame, there have been a couple of moves of all posts between platforms with the last being to WordPress in 2015. Products were also moved from a single all-encompassing site to a series of niche sites. All that shuffling has led to errors in old blog posts.

Over a month ago I started the process of fixing the errors. My first pass showed 433 individual posts were linking to blog URLs that had since moved. Some posts only had one bad link while others had several of them. It was a slow process, but absolutely necessary so that when you click on the link that you go to a working page.

Once that first batch was repaired, I targeted another error and it had 1311 posts that needed to be fixed. They tend to be older posts and some just aren’t remotely relevant anymore. I would guess I’m deleting around 10% of them and then repairing the rest. If that was all I did, it would take a few days to fix them all. But I might go a tad crazy and nothing else would get done. I do batches each day and it may be a couple of months before that pass is completed.

After that batch is complete, there may be a few more in need of repair though I have a feeling it will be a much smaller number. To help with the current errors on the pages still in need of repair and even errors that could happen down the road, we built a special page that comes up when those errors occur.

If you’ve noticed there have been fewer new posts the last couple of weeks, it is all this maintenance work to blame. I’ll get back to more writing once it is complete.

Photo by Tim Mossholder