The Dead Link Hunt
Since I have a lot of time on my hands, I manually went through every month in my archives searching for links that no longer work (AKA dead links). At first my goal was simple: Only look for links! But as I started searching for links, I started reading my past entries. I laughed, I cried, I pondered, I went back over it looking for dead links because I forgot what I was doing and was too busy reading old entries.
Just for kicks and giggles, I wanted to share two posts from way back... I nearly peed myself laughing!
Earplugs Please! Apparently I was in a crappy mood when I posted this. I vaguely remember when this happened but I didn't remember blogging about it. Now this I laughed at until I had to go to the bathroom!
Sail by Braille Oh yes, I DO remember that night! All to well! I was really having a trip down memory lane on this one!
Back to the Dead Links
As of now, and after 5 hours of surfing my blog, there shouldn't be any dead links. Well, except for the couple of months in 2006 where you can't click on ANY link anywhere on the blog. But the rest of the blog has all working links. If you find one I missed, shoot me an email at blogwriter at gmail dot com!
Dead Link lesson I learned?
In the beginning of my blogging experience I didn't add links to my posts. I didn't know how, I didn't want to and I didn't see the need for them. Then, apparently sometime in 2005, I figured out how to create links and went stupid with it. Every post for several months had links all over the post. Links to silly .jpg pictures, links to Wikipedia articles, links to YouTube, Facebook, twitter and every site imaginable.
Looking back at these posts I thought they looked like a link whores dream come true but it also made them look... BAD! So I removed a lot of the links that really weren't necessary, fixed the broken links and removed a sentence or two from back posts about links that no longer worked to make the post read better.
It also made me realize that I need to be careful about adding too many links to a post. I like adding them to ingredients in recipes, like the Buckwheat Oat Amaranth Biscuits, because I don't always use common ingredients. But I learned from looking back at posts from years ago how they must look from the new reader who is just now stumbling across my blog.
From now on, I will be more careful with adding links. Not that I am never going to add them, but I will make sure they are relevant to the post and aren't covering every other word like this:
I love blogging! But I will definitely watch the dead links.Some of my posts were that bad! Thanks to ProBlogger for the great tip to keep my blog looking great. I always hated dead links on other sites. I never really thought of going all the way back looking for them on my blog.
My next task: Working on a "Sneeze Page".
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