As a blogger I've noticed that as a post ages the risk of bad hyperlinks within it increases. Web sites reorganize, descriptions of old events are deleted, on-line newspaper articles disappear -- there are numerous reasons why any blog will eventually develop links that fail when the reader clicks on them.
Fortunately there is a free resource to track down bad links automatically. The paid version might be required for various reasons (the web site is over 3,000 pages, to export to Excel, etc.), but I've never needed it.
Here's an example screenshot from scanning my blog (click on the image to enlarge).
Now I must investigate each link and decide whether to replace, repair, remove, or ignore it. I don't worry about the timeout errors because I've discovered these are frequently routing errors somewhere deep in the Internet, and a request can stall at any of up to a dozen nodes on its way. It's not in my power to fix, and the flaw will disappear in a few weeks or months as network routing continually updates.
When I first ran the broken link checker, perhaps 18 months ago, it found almost 400 broken links from my decade of blogging. Now it's just a maintenance issue every six months or so, as above.
Well, ¾ of it, anyway. I've been working for several days on a long post delving into detail on how I constructed the ZoomWalk videos -- photography, computer work, just about any points I could think of.
Last night, only first quarter of it was left. You can imagine how I felt.
What went wrong? I'll never know for sure. If you Google for "blogger ate my post," you'll get plenty of hits. In my case, this was the first time I was actively working on two posts at once; that is, I had the ZoomWalk post and the Easter Toad post being edited in different tabs under FireFox. This may have been a bad idea, if blogger is liable to get confused between the two in some stealthy, bizarre way.
Now I will go back and restart work on the ZoomWalk post, which obviously will be delayed. What will I do differently?
- I will never again work on two posts simultaneously. Oh, more than one can be in draft, but I'll never be in editing mode in different tabs again.
- Save periodic backups for large posts. All I need to do to save the underlying source is click on "Edit HTML," and copy and paste the source into a text editor.
May this never happen to you!
Update 4/28:
Well, the problem does not necessarily lie with editing in two tabs at the same time. Blogger again tried to eat my repair work on the ZoomWalk post yesterday. I was backing up my work periodically into a text file, but there was a better response. When your work gets truncated or reverted, you are in a race with the AutoSave function in the mangled tab. Close it right away, and DO NOT SAVE it. Then go to Edit Posts and start a fresh edit of the affected post. The copy of the blog entry that the browser pulls down from blogger's servers will be the last good auto-save as long as the bad version hasn't been saved. This worked for me, but it works only as long as you can discover the trouble and close the tab before it auto-saves, so continue to make those periodic backups!
I've never had this problem before, so either blogger is going through a troubled spell, or there is something about my very long post that it does not handle well.
Update 6/10:
I'm adding this final observation. I've only had truncation troubles with the one post, but I don't know what triggers it. What I did observe in finalizing that post is that the truncation is most likely to occur when switching between 'Edit HTML' and 'Compose' modes. Perhaps this tidbit will help someone out there.
Update 10/1:
After a while with no problems, two days ago blogger ate a post again. This time, the post was completed and I hit the 'publish' button; the severe truncation (about ¼ was left) must have happened just before or during the publish step. I had grown lazy and had stopped backing up my posts, so I lost a lot of work. Now I must repeat to you and to myself: back it up! back it up! back it up!
Update Jan. 22, 2015:
I have one more failure mode to report that emphasizes the need to back it up. Every so often (using Google Chrome as the browser) the 'Save' button on blogger composition will silently fail. You won't know that anything is wrong until you try to close the tab, when it says you need to save your work, but you can't! Another symptom of the same issue is that when you click on 'Preview' the preview will fail to load.
In these cases, back it up and restart the browser. Then paste the backed-up html into your composition window (in HTML mode) and you're good to go!
