Never endin’ mendin’

Well, that was a fun couple of hours. A couple of days ago I came across Meadow’s excellent blog post On the making of tools. That they can make the tools is awesome enough; that they make them freely available is just lovely. Naturally enough, the one I most wanted to use was Fido, which spelunks through a site looking for broken links, the bane of any long-lived site and one I’ve wrestled with often.

So, I set Fido to work and some time later was presented with a lovely list of 173 broken links¹ on my site, handily formatted to make it really rather easy to find each one and do something about it. And that’s what I’ve been doing, each one by hand.

I lost track of how many I had in fact fixed. Somewhere north of 50, I think. Maybe more. But here’s the thing, Fido faithfully and truthfully reports as broken links that do not deliver what they promise, even though that is not the link’s fault but my server’s. I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth here, just pointing out that if Fido gets a Service Unavailable message or similar, maybe it should take a break and go look for someone else’s broken links before coming back to mine.

Thank you Meadow. I’ll be back, but not too soon.