Broken, orphaned and outside, Part II

Today we continue on from yesterday's blog about website maintenance (yawn). No, don't leave, it's not that bad. Remember we are talking about how to use elementary math we learned long ago.

After being horrified by yesterday's status report, I did some cleaning. The new website status report shows:

• Total files     575
• HTML files  153
• Orphans        260
• All Links     3946
• OK links      3748
• Broken links       0
• External links 198

The HTML files are where our content is located. They contain the text about our products. They also have links to other files:

1. other HTML pages that continue on the same or related subjects
2. interactive graphics that appear in the midst of the page and "know" they are there
3. some graphics, videos, or downloadable files are considered orphans on our site, because they don't "know" they are being referenced

In addition to these links, we also have "external links" which go to other places besides our website:

1. Mailto: links reach out to a mail application; customers use these to send us questions
2. some links take people to other sites, such as our webstore, or to Adobe to get Acrobat Reader
3. other links go to interesting sites with articles about math education

After fixing all these file links, and deleting hundreds of unnecessary files on my local machine, I uploaded all the fixes and ran another report on the site. No change!! What happened, I wondered.

Then I remembered that all the old bad files were still on the host (server in the sky somewhere). Although I had relocated the new, clean-up files to the server, I had not done a cleaning to remove all the old unlinked files. So now there were even more broken links and orphans. Sigh.

So I got up my courage, erased the whole site and uploaded the changed version from my local machine. Five minutes of sweating, and whew! it's all up there and working again.

Math questions for the day:

Q1. How many files got removed?

A1. 1496 - 575 = 921 files were removed.

Q2. How many total links were removed?

A2.  5218 - 3946 = 1272 links were removed.

Q3. How many orphans have found new homes?

A3. 1146 - 260 = 886 orphans are no longer lost and alone.