Broken Link Checker

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Recently I participated in the SITS version of Probloggers 31 Days to a Better Blog which was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my blog. One of the most eye opening exercises was Day 27 which was “Go on a Dead Link Hunt“, which I had never done because the idea of going through posts dating all the way back to 2002 was more daunting than I was willing to deal with. Fortunately Kat recommended the Broken Link Checker plug in (duh Christine, of course there’s a plug in – has anyone else noticed that I look for more difficulty when there are simple solutions?!). As is usually the case with WordPress, installation of the plug in was a breeze and it started looking immediately. The results show up right in your dashboard and by the time it was done, it had found close to a thousand dead links. I’m still not done going through them, but this has been so worth it. I’m chunking the task, doing a bit every time I get some down time, but I could not believe the dead links! The vast majority were links to blogs that no longer existed, which was sad – but some were to news stories and opinions that I may or may no longer agree with and some were to photographs that seem to have disappeared over the course of server changes, and subdomain to primary domain and every thing in between.

I’ve deleted quite a few of the posts. (how did I ever post 4 and 5 times a day?!) Memes, quizzes, silly little filler things, I’ve made some of the posts private as I didn’t want to completely delete them, but they weren’t relevant any longer. I fixed links, created forwarders when necessary and at this point, I have less than 100 left. Yay me! *update* they’re all fixed now!

One of my favorite results was concerning a post from February, 2004. We had a wonderful trip to the Florida Keys and I had the gallery stored under a domain name that I no longer own. I was able to find the gallery on an old hard drive and it’s now connected and online once again.

Filed Under: Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , , August 26, 2010

Six of My Favorite WordPress Plug Ins

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Every so often I go through my plugins, upgrading, activating, deactiving, deleting. . . While I was doing it today, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. Most of them are pretty well known, but I thought I’d share anyway, just in case you might have missed one. I have to tell you it took me forever to narrow it down this far and as always, I do reserve the right to change my mind.

I tried to skip the really obvious ones, but I couldn’t completely as you’ll see below. So, here they are in no particular order, my current favorite WordPress Plug Ins.

  1. Send It Really easy, yet robust newsletter subscription plug in. Yes, it’s in Italian, but there are English instructions too. I love this one!
  2. WP Greet Box – Let’s you show a different welcome message to your visitor, depending upon the referring URL. Very Cusomizable. Change multiple messages, placement, etc. Very easy to use.
  3. Post Ideas – Some people keep them as drafts, but that seems messy to me some how, I much prefer this plug in that lets you jot down any ideas, relevant links, keywords, etc., till you’re ready. Ranks by priority too.
  4. Blog Icons – Makes it ridiculously easy to add favicon and icons for Ipod/Itouch icons to your blog
  5. Follow My Links – Prevents WordPress from automatically adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute. Show your commenters Linky Love, which leads us to: Edit! The gracious author of this plugin was kind enough to stop by and explain that this does not pertain to comments left by readers, only the “authorial comments (i.e., comments made by the post author)”. I took it to mean the author of the comments, because I don’t actually read documentation, I skim it and then just keep pressing buttons till it either works, or I break it completely. You can see his whole comment below.
  6. Comment Luv – Everyone is already using this right? It goes without saying, right?

So tell me, what are your current favorites? Anything you think I absolutely have to know about? I’m all ears eyes. :wassat:

Filed Under: Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , January 19, 2010

Some of my (Current) Favorite Plug Ins

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I’ve been having an awful lot of fun this week setting up a couple of blogs for clients, friends and family. Of course I’m always tweaking this one, as I’m sure you may have noticed, but it’s always interesting to start with a blank canvas and build according to the writer’s unique needs and desires. I thought I’d share with you some of the things that I found, some great old stand-bys, and where and how to implement them. We’re WordPress Centric ’round here, so if that’s not your flavor, you might want to skip this.

First I thought that I would try the plug in that’s gotten so much buzz lately; the Google Analyticator. I came to Google Analytics a little late in the game as I’ve been using Sitemeter for so long that I didn’t really see the need to change. Wrong. Google Analytics is so much more powerful with so many different ways of looking at your traffic and your readers. The Analyticator makes it very easy to install your code to each page, but there are also some other features making it really useful, like putting the code in your footer with the click of a button for faster load times, tracking your adsense information etc. Useful stuff!

404 Notifier: A great one for anyone, but especially if you’ve had your site for a long time and there have been several incarnations of it, there are most definitely old links to pages that no longer exist from other blogs, forums, etc. With 404 Notifier, every time someone gets a 404 error from your site, you’re notified (by email or RSS feed) of the page they were looking for and you can then either modify your 404 page to send the visitor elsewhere in your site or simply create another file of that name. Very cool.

Blog Icons might be my favorite one this week – because I’m insane for customized icons. This one lets you easily add your customized Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon, favicon and feed image to your blog. Go ahead and look, take your iphone and visit colormepink.com – click on the “+” and choose “Add to Home Screen”. Now you have my pretty butterfly icon right there, easy access!

Post Ideas: This is great. Instead of the 300 drafts I would sometimes wind up with, Post Ideas keeps your ideas, target tags and links you want to reference. When you’re ready to write the actual post, click “Write This” and it converts your idea into a New Post and deletes it from Post Ideas. I added a link to this page of my admin panel on my Iphone as well, so I can jot this information down when I’m out of the house. Note: This is compatible with WP 2.7.1 the link is under “Tools” instead of “Manage”.

The last one I’ll talk about today is Podcasting, another one by the developer behind Google Analyticator. Of course you can use it for podcasting, but I needed a way to take a client’s audio file from their commercial and add it to their website for easy listening. This was a simple, elegant way to do it. The best part is, it was so easy to teach the client how to do this for themselves. Yay!

I can’t say enough about WordPress and the community of talented developers working on a never ending stream of great plugins and themes.

Filed Under: Tips & Tricks Tagged With: , , December 30, 2009