Broken, orphaned and outside, Part I

Broken and orphaned and outside.

Sounds sad doesn't it? In this case I am not talking about lonely orphan children, but rather LINKS from one page to another. They are classified as:

• links between various pages within our website
• links to other websites outside our own

Those links can be good (intact), the links can be bad (broken), or pages can be completely without any links at all (orphans).

In a way this is a sad state of affairs, because it means work! I maintain the Excel Math website. While I'm not a programmer, I've done HTML, XML and other kinds of coding in my publishing career.

Our website software checks how pages are linked together. The starting report looked like this:

• Total files     1496
• HTML files    187
• Orphans       1146
• All Links      5218
• OK links      4825
• Broken            62
• External        331

When our site was first built, our developer was also creating some other sites. We agreed it would be worthwhile to share some design elements, saving each of us time and money. Today I realized that many links had been set up to one of the other websites. It closed down (was rebuilt) a few months ago. Those links were to an obscure little utility file used to align columns of tables. Now they were broken.

I hunted and researched and tested and erased. After a couple hours the stats were better. Sometimes higher numbers are better. But not always. With taxes, blood pressure, or broken and orphaned files, lower numbers are better.

Tune in tomorrow for a full report!