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 »

What methods do you provide for people to contact you through your web site? Generally, providing more ways for your visitors to contact you is better, but including everything on your site can get messy, and can also leave your details open to spammers. VisitorContact is a free service that makes it easy and fast to add a smart and stylish customizable contact form to your site. The form is accessed through a nonobtrusive yet noticeable button on the side of your web site and gives your visitors an easy way to get in touch with you though a variety of methods (through email, Twitter, Skype and more), yet also includes some spam protection. Read the rest of this entry »

There are lots of online site building apps out there. Many of them are ancient, horrible to work with, and produce poor results.

Which is why it’s refreshing to see that Tank is different. It’s easy to use, the basic version is free, and in the right hands, it’s capable of producing some pretty good results. If you need to put together a quick site with some fairly static pages for one of your projects or a client, it’s worth taking a look. Read the rest of this entry »