Web Worker Daily

I recently moved my web site between platforms, which involved changing the URLs of the pages on the site. As a result, my life as a webmaster has become an ongoing hunt to find and fix broken incoming or internal links on the new site.

Linkpatch is a web app designed for people like me who are on a mission to find bad links. Once installed, it sends you an email whenever a user encounters a 404 (page not found) error page on your web site.

Installation

The most difficult part of using Linkpatch is installing the code for the tracking script on your web site. Linkpatch works in a similar way to a statistics package like Google Analytics, except that the tracking script is only installed on your site’s 404 page.

Linkpatch’s installation instructions assume you do not already have a custom 404 page on your site and shows you how to create one. My site already had a custom 404 page. This saved me the step of creating one, but made installing the script itself a little more complex. Read the rest of this entry »