Working at Home on the Internet

Broken Link Checker Plugin for WordPress

A MUST HAVE if you run a Blog Carnival (or just link a lot)

 As most of you already know, I run the Working at Home Blog Carnival every week. Actually, it’s coming up on the 100th Edition in two weeks.

Now, even with weeding out all the Spam submissions and unrelated articles, I still end up with somewhere between 20-30 participants each and every week. Each of those blogs (sometimes websites) have at least two links associated with their submission.

20-30 x 2 x 100 = 4,000-6,000 links.

That’s A LOT of LINKS

That doesn’t even include the Weekly Helpful Reads, Blog Tipping posts or reference links I put within individual posts. At last count, I was well over 12,000 links over three years of Blogging. Not all of which continue to be viable due to a multitude of reasons, ie. the blog was moved, they changed their URL configuration, they just deleted the post or just closed shop. Any number of reasons can cause a link to go bad.

The point is, if you run a Blog Carnival or just link out a lot to your friends and associates, you will eventually end up with some (or a lot) of broken links. If you are just starting out, you can do as I did in the beginning, just check them one at a time. That’s all well and good until you start to run into the hundreds and then thousands of links. You don’t want your readers clicking a bad link because you recommended a site and they get an error on that page because it is no longer there. That is not a good thing.

For the past year or so, I have been depending on Xenu, a link checker that is quite good. As a matter of fact, it is one of the main reasons I have been able to keep up with the myriad of bad links that have plagued me since starting the Blog Carnival. Even though it is downloadable to a desktop and easy to use, it becomes quite cumbersome when you start hitting the number of links with which I have had to deal.

I have been able to keep the broken link problem to a minimum using that program, but I still have to remember to run it, have a different Tab open while being logged into my Blog and accessing each link individually, unlinking them manually and saving the original post. Lots of steps for something that should  be nice and simple.

Luckily for me, I found the Broken Link Checker Plugin written by Janis Elsts. (I wish I remembered where I first saw a reference to this plugin, I would have put a link to them without a doubt.)

It is an easy to install WordPress Plugin, standard installation, simple to use. It will probably take a little time to run the first time if you have never checked for bad links before, but after you have a handle on the broken link problem, this plugin will be there for you whenever a link goes bad.

My Recommendation ***** Stars

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August 19th, 2008 at 06:34pm | Posted by Joe | Carnivals, Linking, Plug-ins | 4 reader remarks | Print This Post

Poll: Do You Use Related Posts on Your Blog?

I have always liked using Related Posts at the end of an article as a reference to things I had written on a particular subject. I feel it adds a little more to the post and it can give the reader, especially new visitors, an idea of where I am coming from at various points on that subject.

I almost gave up. It got to be a little much going through two years worth of posts. Even when I had a good idea of what I wanted to reference, I still had to look through post after post. I just didn’t want to manually go through it all for every post.

I did find a plugin, Cross-references WordPress Plugin by Francesc Hervada-Sala that I am going to try out for a little while to see if it solves the problem of having to spend a lot of time manually looking up old posts.

This weeks poll will try to find out how many of us use related posts on our Blogs.
[poll=12]

I’ll let you know how the plugin works.

Do you use a plugin for related posts? Do you just slog through all your old posts to find them?

November 19th, 2007 at 06:11pm | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, Polls, Tools | 7 reader remarks | Print This Post

SmackFoo WP Plugin for RSS Feeds (a test)

The reason for the SmackFoo Logo above may or may not be obvious to some RSS Subscribers. I just installed the sig-to-feed plugin for RSS Feeds.

This post is more or less a test post to see how well it works. I have added a Copyright signature to my Feeds and needed to see how things turned out. As far as I can tell, you can add anything you like including ads, links and pics.

Installation was quite easy, just download, unzip and upload one file to the wp-content/plugins folder and done. I takes a little more time to decided what to use as a Sig, but that is the hardest part.

To all you RSS Subscribers (there are a couple hundred of you) please do me the honor of adding a comment to this post to give me your impression and let me know if you think this is something worth while. Thanks!

October 20th, 2007 at 06:15am | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, RSS | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post