[Sigia-l] Handling broken links?: RE: Converting static...to CMS

[Andrew McNaughton]

Make yourself a complete listing of the old and new urls, perhaps in a
tab delimited format with old<tab>new on each line.  You should be able to
use this as the basis of a server side redirection system.  Every time
your redirection system sends someone to a new page, have it log the
referer and the out-dated url used.  You can then use this log as the
basis for finding all the broken links.  This is best if you can script
changes to the content after it's in the CMS to fix the links directly.

Note that however well you fix your own links, external links
into your site mean it will be necessary to handle links to old URLs
anyway.  You can use the log file generated by your re-direction system to
identify which sites' owners you might want to tell about the new URLs.

Andrew

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Donna Maurer wrote:

>
> In referring to 'automatic functions' I was thinking more about automatically
> generated lists based on metadata stored with pages or things like that. But
> many/most CMS should have a link checking function (but it's unlikely that it
> will be able to check links into CMS content from old pages, which is the more
> likely problem)
>
> I've previously used the server redirect solution someone else suggested and
> it worked well. You will also need some sort of change management process to
> encourage users to change their bookmarks (or their behaviour) as you wouldn't
> want to keep this forever...
>
> Donna
>
>
> On Tue, 10 Feb 2004 13:05:23 -0500, Nicole Colovos wrote
>
> > I have a client who is converting a static site. The new site will
> > be much easier to navigate however we do not want to effect users
> > who have bookmarked the HTML pages. Is there a smart way to solve
> > this problem? Donna mentioned in her response that  "...if you are
> > moving to a CMS, you should be taking advantage of some of the
> > automatic functions included."  Is this an automatic function that
> > is standard with most CMSs? Accept my apology if this is an
> > elementary question, I am kind of a newbie.
> >
>
>
>
>
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Andrew McNaughton           Currently in Boomer Bay, Tasmania
andrew at scoop.co.nz
Mobile: +61 422 753 792     http://staff.scoop.co.nz/andrew/cv.doc