Spring Cleaning?

Yes, I know it's not Spring. It's December, and we're about to get our first real storms if the weathermen have any clue.. oh wait, I forgot: this is New England. They have no clue.

Never mind that. The important thing is that I've been doing a lot of website housecleaning: finding broken links, fixing up outdated articles, checking subject tags.. you know, dusting and polishing.

I've found the darndest things. Entire sections that were using a theme that I dumped years ago, mistagged articles.. for example, just a minute ago I found "Why are in-addr.arpa addresses backwards?" and it was tagged as "Misc". Miscellaneous?? How about "Networking"? Sheesh.

Well, that kind of mistake happens. So does bad formatting - that often comes up because I change some css style or add in some new page element and forget that it may affect some older posts adversely.

Oh, and spelling. I HATE spelling mistakes and typo's, but the darn things manage to get by me time after time. I've mentioned before that my "typing brain" sometimes mis-hears what I want it to do, and sometimes the results are interesting: "bear" for "bare" is bad enough, but I've found worse..

Anyway, no matter how small your website is, it's worth going back and checking things. I try to check at least one page every day (I use the "Random Page" link under the "Articles" menu above), and sometimes I sit here for hours checking page after page. There are always more things that need fixing, both mechanical and in the content itself - your site probably isn't any different.

"Oh, I rely on the readers to tell me", you say. Well, yes, sometimes readers will take the time to drop an email or leave a comment. But honestly, most of the time they won't, and that's particularly true when a first time visitor lands on some page with a problem: it's very unlikely that they'll stop to tell you about it. Your regular readers might, but they aren't usually reading old pages, are they?

No, most of the work belongs to you. It's your site, it's your responsibility to hunt down its problems. Darren Rowse has a post and video that suggests some of the cleanup you should be thinking about.

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Tue Dec 11 15:57:35 2007:   rbailin


One of those immutable laws of the Internet is that you can't write an article about spelling errors without the article having one or more of them:

responsiblity

--Bob



Tue Dec 11 16:20:17 2007:   TonyLawrence


Thanks :-)

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