Site(s) Updates

I'm such a terrible Webmaster. When I first started doing this, I wasn't that bad - no, really - but so much has changed since then, not to mention how many times the site has moved, etc.

The bigger problem is updates, of which I've just done another round (and am still working on), because The Weirding is fucking huge! It doesn't look like it, and technically speaking, I've tried my best to contain it more this go-round (another problem, read on), but it has thousands of links, hundreds of files, and scores of directories. Changing a single link or filename can often lead to massive headaches which don't appear for weeks, even months! I am dependent on certain Webmaster tools to help me locate these because there can be so many in so many disparate places. I try my best to "fix" them through the front-end so that they redirect to the right place, but that doesn't always happen.

I also find myself chasing nonsense far too often. For example, the software I use, like all software, has some bugs and kinks. One of these is that you have to click and physically select "Remove Link" before you delete a link's text - you can't just highlight the text and remove it like you can in almost every other program - and if you forget to do that, the highlighted text is removed, but the link remains. It doesn't really mean anything - I suppose if you managed to drop your cursor directly over that cursor's-length of page, you'd find the "hidden" link (often to nowhere) - but the tools I use, and the search engines, still pick them up. Many times, I've spent hours hunting-down links I know I removed only to discover I'd only removed the hyperlinked text and the link itself was still buried in the document (and being picked-up).

Anyway, I went through and did a bunch of maintenance-type stuff both last night and again today. Things are tighter, there are fewer broken links (for which I apologize profusely, but again, I don't usually know about them for several days or more), and so forth, but I can't be sure of anything at this point.

Like I said, once I get enough of the raw content up again - and this has been my strategy from Day One (which hasn't worked, mind you, but it's kinda too late in the game to change it now) - I'm going to sweep through and do a major overhaul. The problem is that things have changed so often between the planning/development and actual publishing phases that I really don't know where everything is anymore and I can't really "see" it until the physical pieces are actually in-place.

Anyway, things should be easier to find and should (hopefully) actually be there once you do find them. So, enjoy.

© C Harris Lynn, 2009